Studio Gateway I Semester 1, 2015

Ways of seeing: Summer Hill on a Saturday Afternoon

Experimenting with an animation based on photos I took in the piazza in Summer Hill, sitting on a bench watching people and watching pigeons. Even though I sit here often, I get this strange feeling of intruding on the space of the old men who sit for hours every day, and the pigeons who seem to loiter in a peaceful way, pecking the ground and, uh... courting other pigeons.

I was here for 45 minutes just sitting and noticed the details which contributed to the sense of stillness and movement in this neighbourhood. It’s busy but quiet, and nobody rushes around but everyone’s walking with some purpose.

I ended up choosing photographs of pigeons showing affection towards each other and collated them into this .GIF, which summarised much of my experience of watching these pigeons. I looked down from above as they danced at my feet.

I then edited and mashed a series of photographs I took of people’s legs as they walked back to their cars in the car park. I took these photos from a pigeons-eye-view (i.e. ground level -- it’s hard to engage in courtship procedure while flying) without a tripod. I think the agitated movement of the animation mimics the peculiar rate that time passes when you sit and watching the world, so it’s kind of like what pigeons experience of people when they’re taking a break from pecking invisible crumbs and having sex. 

In class Week 11: Chance

A collage of a postcard of a David Moore photograph which I’d brought into class. I sliced the image vertically through the faces of the people in the photo and rearranged the image so that the faces lined up, and limited myself to one image arrangement — I tried to complete each face by choosing the other side of another person, but once the slice had been laid down I didn't shuffle the image any further. I found two more images which interested me by entering a photo of my collage into Google Images and finding similar gelatin photos of crowds. I sliced these images in Photoshop and rearranged them in a similar manner.

Thematic concern: “Ways of Seeing” I am wondering about the way we perceive the world as a mental image pieced from fragments of visual information. Our world can only appear to us in the detail that we see if we compartmentalise the most interesting or important fragments. Photographs allow us a full look of a snippet of time, but require a different kind of guesswork in imagining the picture outside of the frame. I am interested in further exploring my group’s Assignment 2 work (which considered a series of photographs of a stranger as a stimulus to examine the different ways each our group imagined the details of the life of the stranger) — I am investigating research about immediate visual impressions, the intuitive “sense” we get of another person’s personality and trustworthiness based on their facial expression.

Erasing by confusing: who would use this bathroom?

Playing with the idea of replacement. Men can still use this bathroom which hasn’t changed except for the sign, but it’s probably not going to be used. Redundant bathroom.

Experiment 3: Ice

Having started with a simple idea of turning a box into a sphere, a lot of ideas have developed, leaving me with a valuable understanding of my values. The process of experimentation, trying to distance my creative practise from preconceived ideas has meant that my artwork has developed its concept slowly and taken a softer path towards meaning, forging a communicative role for my more unconscious thoughts and motivations involved when I decide what I want to create. Rather than slapping a sticker onto an art-work saying “I FEEL/BELIEVE/WANT YOU TO KNOW _______ SO HERE’S SOME SYMBOLISM”, my work with boxes has evolved from something I thought was detached from my values into quite a political artwork. I only realised this when a friend asked me what I was working on at uni, and I started to describe my final artwork for this assessment, and I was using a lot of emotion to describe my despair at the ecological cost of waste. How much packaging we use for trivial, unnecessary things, rarely stopping to consider the cost of things if they seem to be “one offs” or something to soothe or entertain. So I was explaining my artwork and its relevance to quite a complex concept, at a point where I was concerned that I didn't even have a strong concept! This was great learning for me. I didn't ascribe meaning to the work after I'd made it, but rather allowed my thoughts to accrue over the four weeks during brainstorming sessions when I was falling to sleep so gradually that the meaning was lost to my attention. I am much prouder of the work that I’ve made knowing that it reflects a lot of work and attention I’ve given the assignment, and I’m less anxious about its final aesthetic because I’m confident that I have learnt another little byte about how my mind works. I need to work on recording my thoughts in an organised way so that I can track the development of my ideas – taking a photo of whiteboard mindmaps is what I’ve been doing, but I didn’t reflect on these photographs. So in the future I would like to record these mindmaps on paper or even digitally, then pop them on a blog so that they exist for reflection in chronological way.

My ideas developed from a rounded tea box, my first experiment. I wanted to explore the utility of boxes – i.e. what makes them “work” for us. What is their purpose, and how can I reduce the practicality of a box without making it completely non-functioning.

Once I had created the round box, I held it in my hands and realised that it had the same feeling as cradling a tea cup, which was funny to me seeing as it was a box with TEA written on the side. I thought it could be used to contain tea with a “just add water” kind of appeal, which could work! From here, I thought about ways you could skip steps between the transportation of a good and consuming it, like having a cup of tea by just adding milk to something you’d bought in the shop. This gave birth to my second experiment: making a tea cup out of the ingredients used in a cup of tea. Water, sugar, tea — just add milk. I tried to make toffee out of water and tea, which I was going to first make into a simple box before trying to mould into the shape of a tea-cup. As soon as I started the experiment I decided to expand my idea to make a breakfast setting in a similar fashion: a box made out of weetbix, just add milk! So I ran these two experiments simultaneously.

It worked at first, I made toffee and the walls of a weet-bix box, but as time went on the toffee turned from rock hard to completely liquid again, and the weetbix developed a really nasty looking mold. I chucked them both out instead of playing with the failure because I didn’t want to get sick from that mold, and the toffee wasn’t inspiring. I’m pretty sure there’s an ingredient in tea leaves which prevented it from setting... I am too stubborn to accept defeat so I was keen to keep going with the idea of making things from boiled sugar. A success story from this experimentation was my “weet-bix bowl” which was made by pressing damp weetbix to the side of a bowl until it set hard in the freezer, which would happily hold a milk which you could eat from. No utensils nor packaging required!

My next project diverged from ideas of supermarkets and food packaging. I wanted to create a box as simply as possible, kind of following on from the theme of reducing packaging to its simplest form. I ended up freezing 500mL of water into a block of ice and using salt to hollow it out, controlling the way that it melted so that it became a vessel before reverting to water. I took a photo of the ice every five minutes until it melted. I was happy with this experiment because I didn’t expect it to be as beautiful as it was. I think it helped me to loosen up my mind, to know that I could have a very simple approach to my research and know that I was adding to my concept and clarifying my direction as I approached the stage where I would begin making my final work.

The idea of making a simple pinata came to me during a brainstorming session, knowing that I was enjoying playing around with toffee as a medium, and I later realised that I was influenced by an article I'd read in the newspaper that day but forgotten about! (It’s interesting to think about how many experiences shape your behaviour without you realising at all. It gives a lot of value to the notion of play and creative experimentation, because you're almost deliberately avoiding rationalising your direction when you just “do” without much “why”.) I started thinking about the amount of cardboard used in a pinata, all the paper used to make it pretty, when the most exciting thing is the lollies. Why not create a pinata from lollies? I thought about it for a while. It’s not the lollies that’s the exciting bit, though we think it is. It’s the concealment and not knowing what’s in there, and the competition which makes the pinata most exciting. The packaging – the donkey shaped box – is the attraction of the pinata. At the same time, a LOT of cardboard and paper is used for this 5 minute party game. Every pinata is a packaging within a packaging, and there are a lot of parties with pinatas, and there are other games which are much less wasteful. And the aim of the game is to whack the shit out of a box! It’s fun, but it’s a disaster to environmental conservation efforts if you consider that landfill and land-clearing are the last thing on anyone’s mind when they're in leisure mode. Most parties use a lot of paper and disposable things, and en masse probably has a significant impact on the health of our planet, but I reckon we're less likely to feel guilty about waste when we’re more focussed on having a relaxed and happy time.