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)Wednesday 21 September 2011
Today, our group (Group 1) was divided into four partnerships of five members - Neil, Zak, Sally and Stephen were the other members of my team.
The brief was to find one ‘thing’ from each of the following categories:
- An interesting building
- An unusual animal
- A still life
- A landscape
- A portrait of a distinctive person
However, we were also given five different styles in which to record these ‘things’:
- Sound
- Photograph
- Object
- Text
- Action
The aim was to bring the ‘things’ back to the studio in each of the different styles. As we left the studio in search of our first item, we came across a very interesting building indeed. The windows were smashed, the doors boarded up, and buddleias grew out of cracks in the brickwork. We wanted to collect this building, or a fragment of it, and Sally spotted a few rusty nails that had fallen out of the decaying woodwork on a boarded up window, which we collected as our object. Neil likes breaking into abandoned buildings, and resolved to get into this particular warehouse, ‘The Pearl Works’, so we walked around the building where we found a butterfly basking on the last open buddleia flower, which we photographed to consider for our unusual animal category.
We headed into the centre of town next, where we were handed multitudinous flyers by students and night club workers wearing hoodies trying to entice freshers to go to their particular establishment. We accepted them, mostly out of pity, but we noticed that as so many had littered the pavement, they became a sort of ‘fresher’s landscape’, and so we gathered as many of them as possible for our text category, assuming that when we returned to the studio we could litter them on the floor, recreating the landscape.
The club ‘Players’ were advertising their nightclub with dance demonstrations, and we thought their breakdancer was particularly distinctive - Neil impressed us all by assuming a breakdance move, and we decided this portrait could be represented by this action.
We decided to look for our other ‘things’ at the rail station, where we found an astonishing amount of bicycles chained up on the train platform. It was obvious to the group that this should be our still life, as each bicycle represented a person who had gone on a journey, crammed together like they will be on their train. Each bicycle was distinctive; some were practical; some were decorative; and yet together they created a mass of objects that were intriguing and exceptional. The easiest (and least illegal) way to collect these bikes was through a photograph.
On our expedition, we came across very few animals - only a few dogs and insects. Someone suggested micro-organisms, that for sound we could cough on our peers, spreading the ‘fresher’s ‘flu’ bug.
When we returned with our finds, we were instructed to create - as a group - a proposal, an installation, a drawing, an anything, from the ‘things’ we had collected.
We discussed in our group that a theme seemed to have emerged from the things we had brought back: the theme of multiples. The rusty nail we collected was one of many that had been hammered into the window frames; we had hundreds of flyers; the breakdancer was one of many advertisers for nightclubs; the bicycles were initially of interest because of the sheer quantity of them and there are billions of micro-organisms in a single human cough.
Having decided that we were intrigued by this theme of ‘The Multiple’, we suggested creating some sort of structural form, like a house of cards, out of the flyers we had collected. We also thought about potentially hanging them to create a different sort of landscape which surrounds the audience, rather than just scattered on the floor. It was also suggested that we could make a poem out of random words cut from the flyers.
We remembered the story Sadako Sasiki who was one mile away from ‘Ground Zero’ when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima - Sasiki believed that if she could fold one thousand paper cranes she would be healthy - but died before she could finish the full one thousand. We experimented with folding aeroplanes, boats, hats and fortune tellers, as well as ripping and folding the flyers in half. Turning them into these different forms negates their intended purpose, just as the function of a ‘Readymade’ is removed when it is placed in the context of a gallery. We were interested in this idea of taking the purpose from the flyers, and considered folding them all into the same shape so that they become a group of boats or planes or shredded pieces of paper. We decided that in order to regulate the flyers we would paint over them, turning them back into blank sheets of paper.
This idea excited the entire group, and we decided we would hand these blank flyers out to students: taking this idea further we suggested a webpage dedicated to the ‘blank’, called ‘The White Project’ where we post pictures of white sheets of paper and leave blank messages or updates. We could hold a ‘blank’ exhibition of white paintings. We could have white T-shirts with ‘The White Project’ printed in white that the members of the team can wear. The possibilities are endless!
This afternoon we painted the flyers white and tomorrow we will hand them out to students.
Thursday 22 September 2011
Last night Stephen made a facebook group for "The White Project" (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-White-Project/117877298319059), so we wrote the address on to the flyers and handed them out to students near Blackwells bookshop. Amusingly, only a few people were surprised that we had handed them a blank piece of paper - it was suggested afterwards that perhaps "Fresher's Fatigue" made people less likely to care about what we handed to them, and that we should try handing them out later in the year. Perhaps we should repeat the project at Meadowhall or in the main street in order to have more of an effect on our audience.
