MAKING AND CURATING

Above are an assortment of pictures the week prior to the installation. 

During this week I was both working on my own project and assisting the group development of the show as its own exhibition including the layout and coordination of other’s work. 

As well as working on my own project, in the weeks leading up to the 2nd Year Show I worked as a representative for the Making & Curating module. This involved working with a team of people from across the department which was a really good experience. It also gave me a new insight into the show which improved my conceptual ideas and drove me to put them into practice. 

Once I’d made a longlist of possibilities for the extracts, I edited them on Adobe  Photoshop. I deepened the shade of the ink so it could be more easily discernible then removed all traces of the discoloured paper background from the text itself. I then saved and exported these edited extracts. 

After collecting images of the source material from the original physical copies, I reread over 200 pages of original handwriting to select the quotes. The curatorial process here was based on some of the elements discussed in earlier posts. I felt very aware that the selected quotes would entirely dictate the representation of the journals, and thus, Elizabeth Fry herself. Ruminating on this, I decided it wasn’t a large enough ethical concern (politically I mean, regarding Fry’s work as a woman in the public vs private spheres as originally anticipated) to change the work. This idea of representation is core to the work itself so is unavoidable with the source material.

Putting ethics aside, the selection of quotes was a purely artistic one. I felt inspired by the poetic feeling in a lot of Fry’s writing, something which attracted me to her diaries in the first place. Her writing is rhythmic, self-aware, vulnerable and honest. It combines her philosophical and theological ideas with mundanity of her daily life, and the poetic feeling is heightened by teenage emotionality in her early journals (the ones I chose to focus on for the work). 

When abstracted from the rest of the text, many of these ‘poeticisms’ gain even more artistic weight. They’re bold, slightly absurd and intimate. The distance of time isn’t eliminated, but it is mutated into a different sort of distance of abstraction. 

I was able to access the original source material of Elizabeth Fry’s journals. For £5 per session I was able to photograph the journals, using an iPhone camera only as DSLR photography was prohibited in the library. 

After visiting the archive 3 times over a two week period, I reviewed all of the photographed journal pages. I highlighted large extracts of text and made note of the page number and the file name of the photograph to return to. 

SKETCH OF LAYOUT

This was a first sketch of the project, quickly done to explore some ideas about the way the extracts with be presented.