Contextual Research

With my head down in my machines, I have found that a lot of the exploration I have gone through can be found in parts in various other existing works. In galleries it can be very difficult to identify these - and other times very easy.

It was easy, for example, when looking at Damien Hirst’s work “Forms without Life” in the Tate Britain, to see ideas that I have been circling. 

Hirst writes: “There’s that kind of morbid element to it [death], which is lost because we’re so accustomed to seeing shells.” And this relationship between the object on display having once had purpose and form is very much an idea that formed the foundations of my project, along with the presentation of these shells - simply laying them out on display. 

The life that they were once part of, they can never fulfil that role again, they can never be used for that purpose again, just like the screws I’ve removed from machines.

I was also concerned with looking at multiples - art involving lots of individual components en masse; Carl Andre’s ‘Equivalents’ are all also technically ‘found objects’, arranged neatly, so that “they come above your ankles, as if you were wading in bricks.”

I find that arrangements of the bricks has a wonderfully satisfying symmetry. The sort that I would certainly want to mess up - then again, it’s exactly the same sense of satisfaction I find from laying out the neat presentation of my own work.

A piece more closely aligned with some of the theory behind my work is ‘Cold Dark Matter : An Exploded View’. Cornelia Parker was looking in to ‘cartoon deaths’. “To analyse something that was totally beyond our control and emotional control”, she has said. In her artistic process, she exploded a garden shed (“The garden shed came about because I was trying to find something universal and archetypal.”) and with the broken remains, suspended them in the air and placed a light in the centre - and as a result, it looks as if the explosion is suspended in time. 

This is similar to what I am trying to do - taking something apart, destroying something we recognise, and displaying remnants of it to provoke a reaction. 

FMP Week 4

Thinking about how I might display my final presentation, and also about the concept of removing the artefacts further from their functions, I laid out four of the nuts on a plain white table, in the exact composition of an earlier photograph I had taken of the same objects.

I did this because I wanted to see if people viewed the objects differently to the photograph. I have found that as the compositions I lay out are temporary, the only way I have of preserving them is the actual photographs I keep, and therefore my sketchbook is full of these 2D images. 

But if these photographs are to be treated as a ‘final piece’, then this means that they are one further step removed from their function in the original object. I need to remind myself that these experiments did start from removing an object from it’s purpose, and then took a step towards experimenting with perception.

When looking at the photographs, people thought that the layout was nice, the composition seemed very much ‘like me’. But that was really the extent of the reaction, whereas when the physical objects were before them, they were more inquisitive - perhaps just a sign that they’re most certainly members of the 3D class? But also they went to pick them up, to interact with them, they moved their heads around to get different views of them and looked at the texture of the rust.

I think that this was a big wake up call to me, as before this point I had been starting to lose the difference between a pointless object and a photograph of a pointless object. Really, I learnt that when a strange object is facing a stranger, they assume that there is a meaning, they assume that there is something important there, whether they are capable of seeing it or not. 

I don’t know how much of an impact this will actually have on my work though, given that my plan had always been to display some form of 3D object, and my platform of working had always been beyond 2D. I suppose this means that I was already running along the lines I would prefer, so it’s nice to have developed the presentation there and back again.

FMP Week 3

Taking apart the lawn mower was an awful lot of fun - and also revealed something that might seem obvious if you know anything about the structure of a lawn mower - they have very few screws. 

After removing the various nuts and bolts, I had a chunky handful, and several large parts of lawn mover. It makes sense, it’s a heavy duty piece of machinery that has to be tough, it gets pulled and bashed about, so most of it should be fixed much more securely than with just nuts and bolts.

For the final comparison that I have used google to create, one image in particular was very striking - the star of David. Whilst I hadn’t noticed that the image itself was negative, I focused on the star itself - realising that by joining up the six points creates a hexagon, and therefore the outline of the nuts from the machine. 

And after this comparison, it is very easy to see how the shadows in the image might be related to the shadow we see on the moon - and then the lunar cycle. Whilst I am hesitant to so often draw comparisons between the images I create and space - just because it’s one that so often comes up - it’s undeniable that I find something attractive in the concept of uniting something so small and trivial with something so vast.

Because then we can ask, how is a diagram of space any more relevant to your life than the screws holding your lawn mower together? I know that I naturally assume anything in connection with the vastness of space to be much more impressive, and therefore important, but all of those huge rocks floating out there are really just as trivial to me as some screws in a broken lawn mower in a dump across town. It’s really strange to think about things like that, because in perspective these things will have little bearing on how I live my life.

FMP : Additional Research

In an exercise to gain a fresher perspective on the images I’m creating, I entered my own pictures into google images to find similar images online. The sort of objects that are compared are metal, shiny, and some look valuable - obviously because the objects in my own photos are metal, shiny, and honestly look as if they could be made of more precious metals if you didn’t know that they were screws.

I think this sheds some light on why I find the screws to be so aesthetically pleasing - they look as if they could be made of precious metals. Before now people have likened them to toy soldiers, buildings, and figures, but jewellery is a concept that managed to totally pass me by. However, this only really applies to the images I have of gold screws.

I also laid out all of the unique screws I found in the sewing machine, as another attempt to sort them into some form of order. The image itself does a good job of highlighting the variation in on machine alone, and the resulting similar images from the google search validate comments made by my tutor, who is constantly reminded of a type face when looking at my presentations - it’s already true to say that these images are a form of communication, and if we extend the metaphor then it’s obvious that each screw is a letter or character of a written language. 

Interestingly, a host of charts also appeared, most notably the bar chart - the different heights of the screws create different levels, and again, now it has been brought to my attention it is very difficult to not draw the comparison. 

Unsurprisingly, laying out all the black screws in a line had much the same effect when I decided to google image search them - where my peers had again said they thought of either font, or some numerical system, google agreed. Most of the images were plain black font on white paper (unsurprisingly) and then a few loading symbols.

Whilst I wouldn’t have given much thought to someone who had said ‘loading pages’, its a very valid comment. When comparisons like ‘language’ and ‘soldiers’ are made, one of the things they have in common is that they are waiting at the ready - a language is there to be read, an army to be ordered, they’re ready in position for a second party. They won’t do much on their own, just like the screws themselves.