Collaboration with Daisy-Mae. - Reflection

Collaborative Project Outcomes 

For this mini project, I started by looking at my practice and thinking about who I know that explores similar interests and concerns as I do. I immediately thought of my friend Daisy-Mae who has been working on trapping moments in resin. For our collaborative mini project we began by getting together and discussing the where our starting base should be. It soon became clear that although our ideas where similar, our ways of working were not. This difference it seems has become an interesting thing, a sort of dialogue if you will between our individual practices. Through conversation we agreed on the parameters of our shared collaboration. We were both going to use soap as the main material within our work, as we liked the notion that objects as representations of memory, that could be trapped within the soap, and over time if used would be washed away. We agreed before practical began that we would not communicate whilst the work was being made so that we couldn't influence each others thought processes. 

My Experimentation

Developed narrative

 

Final Results

Reflection: From Group Crit

The curiosity of seeing for the first time what each other has made was electric, what was interesting was how without discussing at all, both of our works were focused on recording evidence in some way. Daisy-Mae started researching into crime that had happened near her home town in Liverpool, she became fascinated by the crimes involving children as this seems the greatest juxtaposition of all, as children are symbolic in representing innocence and purity. I myself began by looking into fragmented memory from an event, for example a memory has many different components, as well that the deliberate actions themselves, there are accidental triggers to unlocking memory, such as the time of year it happened, where geographically it took place. The clothing you wore on that day, etc, etc. We both started experimentation, by trying to take though chance elements and lock them into a memory bar made from soap. I then started to think of memory in the terms of a string of events that are connected yet disjointed. Therefore, I attached the forms to rope in hope that they would better link together as a fragments of an event, or that informed and event. The soap is hard to work with as a material, as items started sinking down or floating to the surface, this enriched the narrative of being based on a crime. After reviewing my work thus far I decided to develop an element that started to stand out to me as being the most successful. By taking images from an unknown source and cutting out pictures of individuals, I am creating a narrative of unknown truth or myth.  Inspired by the parish notice boards I had seen frequently as a child, walking home from school, I wanted to make something that was familiar yet defamiliar simultaneously, reminiscent of missing people who's pictures stay on our streets and within our eye line, yet remain lost and overlook. I feel that I have accomplished that by my choice of placement, construction and materials, that all tie together the narrative I am trying to present.