I found this postcard collection in a charity shop in Brixton. They are lovingly arranged into photo album and mostly date from 1910. They are from Germany, France and Belgium and in total there are 39 cards.
Another addition to the celebrity series still working on it, this was a little harder than with the Charles and Diana, Hitler and Cowells faces are quite different. Cowells face is much longer than Hitlers.
Smocking with Lizzie Finn
My craft to work with for the project was smocking which I was awarded randomly. We were required to make two pieces of typography using out craft. The model above is a fine example of how to wear a smock. Smocking is an embroidery technique used to gather fabric so that it can stretch. Before elastic, smocking was commonly used in cuffs, bodices, and necklines in garments where buttons were undesirable. Smocking developed in England and has been practiced since the Middle Ages and is unusual among embroidery methods in that it was often worn by laborers. Other major embroidery styles are purely decorative and represented status symbols. Smocking was practical for garments to be both form fitting and flexible, hence its name derives from smock — a farmer's work shirt. Smocking was used most extensively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Inspired by two smocking books I got form the Chelsea library I got smocking . . .
Step one was to pleat a very long piece of calico fabric.
Then came the needle and thread.
Paper Curating
In collaboration with MA's on ISD and CPCW we created a proposal for an exhibition entitled "The Banality of Everyday".
"‘Small gestures in specific places’ – this could be the coda for the time when the place for art is on the move. Today the form of art bends to the circumstance, and the boundary with the everyday blurs. The placement of small gestures in specific places can at first glance be continuous with our daily stride, sight, breath, touch and reach.”
- Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics (2006) p.138
The Banality of Everyday examines not only the invasion of the private territory, where the basic and monotonous gestures of “way of operating” are practiced and repeated everyday, but also potentiality of generating personal history and narrative under the certain rules and systems of the space. As the platform of this in-progress project, the flat room will be inhabited by solitary participants for a certain duration based on provided objects which have particular functions. Everyday life seems banal, quotidian and ordinary within generic socio-cultural codes. However, it is continuity of the uncanniness as being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Every time confronting a basic demand for safety, security and comfort, we are constructing everyday activities through various tactics. The project intends to bring an artist, Alison Balance, as the last visitor of the room. To terminate the project, having the creative freedom to the space, Balance will explore performative reactions in response to the space that have been constructed by audiences.
Within the multiple trajectories and the distinction between the foreign and the common, this site-specific practice will be a globally ongoing project which investigates the space’s potential with the diverse cultural production in everyday surroundings.
Working with my fellow GDC student Jane we brainstormed ideas of promoting and discussed the practicalities of the project. We needed to have a website for prospective participants to get information and book their time in the room. The website would act as an archive where documentation of the exhibition would be available. It would also allow us to stream the closing performance by artist Alison Balance. High-lighting the ordinary became the aspect of the project we would use in our work. The initial idea was to create a viewing apparatus in the from of a postcard with the image of two hands creating a viewfinder. The holder is free to create compositions and look at things carefully in a manner which maybe they wouldn't normally. Taking this apparatus we made a viral video following the use of the postcard. As we envisaged the exhibition as one which would travel to several cities, the viral would be one of a series made in each city. We also created posters which feature the postcard.
View the website here
Fanzine with Ben
The brief entailed creating a fanzine on our research topic. I am currently reading the work of Michael Foucault on power. The effect of a tendency to disindividualise power is the perception that power resides in the machine itself rather than in its operator. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. This theory can be applied to relationships also and if we consider the relationship/marriage as the institution/machine. Prince Charles and Lady Diana is the first of a celebrity series I intend on doing on the subject.
Posts
