Idea from Room3

03/11/2009

A group of year 10 girls have just spent the best part of an hour in my studio. It’s fun to see how they connect with my ideas and watch them process what it looks like to be an artist.

Art in the ‘real world’ is so different from art at school. I’m glad to be millions of miles away from the performance of GCSE and A-Level art where I felt pressure for every page in my sketchbook to look picture perfect. I’m proud of my ‘sketchbooks’ now, scraps of found papers all bound together in various ways. They document important moments where I find myself in a different world and I just want to ‘draw’ – not draw pictures, but draw ideas.


Here is a photo of my most recent drawing:

The idea developed over 4 pages of scribbles following my 30 Seconds of Idea in Room3 (ref last blog entry) and I’m quite excited about it.

I’m hoping to exhibit in Peckham in February and am keen to develop my project in a direction that not only reflects an autobiographic interest and exploration into the notions of Home but possibly gives voice to some other people’s experience of home. I found that last sentence hard to spit out, it feels arrogant to assume that I’ll be able to ‘give voice’ to anyone or that I’m in a position to do so – but for now, perhaps we can assume that I will end up in a position to do so (before February), if I’m not yet.

So what I’d really like to do it make work that responds to what Home means when Home is living in one part of one of the local estates in Peckham. I’ve invited the kids at RMS to input into my ideas and one of them suggested theatrical readings of dramatic stories about home on the estates – but I know for certain that I do not want a performance. I want something really authentic and am trying to develop my ideas in a way that don’t assume a certain response to what Home may look like. Maybe the tone will end up more ‘I’m proud of my home’ than ‘gosh, home is a really hard reality.’

So this drawing demonstrates the latest development of my idea. 60 cardboard boxes (I bought them on ebay today – it feels crazy BUYING cardboard boxes!) with windows and doors cut out, but re-presented in a different context, different scale, different positioning etc. I really wanted to be able to visualise the size/scale of the potential artwork, so I mapped out (in space, with masking tape) the size of the piece depending on different size boxes - 3 different scale options (i'm going with the one in the foreground of this image.)

At the moment I’m thinking the boxes will be green...

…That's because of the history of where my project has come from.

Anyways, gotta run – once again trying to juggle time. Struggling with working for myself and other people legitimizing me not wanting to be flexible with time spent working for myself. Also, I’m trying to function with the discipline of 500 word posts! 498 today. (+ a few because I added a paragraph of waffle with image.oops)