Figure 1 (The Collection Museum, 2014)
A few weeks ago we had been given individual tasks to complete, (you may remember this from my first blog post), another task of mine was to find lost and abandoned objects and to create a story behind them. Now at first I thought this was rather odd (then I thought it’s site specific so I should just accept it at this point and I did), so I went on a trek and found a cork from a wine bottle and a headband for a toy doll and this is what I came up with:
Cork – I imagined two grey haired, bearded, old drunk men walking down a cobble stoned residential street at night causing a ruckus; laughing, shouting and arguing with each other, whilst holding a bottle of wine in a brown bag that they’d just bought. They argue for a moment about who should get to drink it first, this goes on for a while until the old man holding the bottle pulls off the cork and throws it. But when it hits the floor it nearly hits a cat, which meows and runs off. This causes the old pair to laugh hysterically and carrying on their way drinking as much as they can.
Toy headband – I imagine a little girl walking with her mother hand in hand. The little girl is being a little slow walking because she’s playing with her doll, while the mother is frustrated with how slow she is walking because she has an appointment to get to, a dentist appointment for her daughter. So the mother then tugs on her daughter’s hand, the daughter knocks her doll against the wall, which she was pretending was a cat walk, so the hair band the doll was wearing falls off. The little girl cries about the lost accessory but the mother ignores her and carries on dragging her to the dentist.
Currently you may be thinking ‘What is the relevance of all this?’ Well, that’s what I thought until I tried to understand why we were given this task. This task forced me to acknowledge the surroundings where I found my items and take into account every step of my journey. Once I had chosen the cork and the toy headband as my items, I had to then create a narrative for these items based on the location.
Taking this idea of creating a narrative by breaking the cork and toy head band we were able to use this technique on The Usher Gallery e.g.
Toy Headband – female doll – young girl – walking with adult – location was a residential area – probably near child’s home
This technique is what we used for our site e.g.
Museum – was James Usher’s home – an avid collector of ceramics and other items – the ceramics were examples of beautiful china – everything in his collection was beautiful to look at
This led us to think about how the items James Usher collected were beautiful and extravagant but we asked ourselves the question what happened to those items that were not beautiful and were not picked?
The items that were not chosen then became the backbone behind our performance idea, and essentially led us to focus on the representation of ceramics.
Mia
Work cited:
The Collection Museum (2014) Art At The Collection [online] Lincoln: The Collection Museum. Available from http://www.thecollectionmuseum.com/?/visiting-us/art-at-the-collection [Accessed 31 March 2014]