This year I have separated my research, reflection and experimentation into their own sketchbooks, a method of working which I started in Foundation and discontinued in first year to my disadvantage. In Monday’s tutorial we discussed this difference in work ethic between working every day during a time of lockdown to socialising in first year. My three intentions for this semester are to focus on my practice and experiment as much as I research and reflect; to try three dimensional work; and to become more comfortable collaborating with other people.
I started to brainstorm ideas from my research, Friday’s session and Monday’s tutorial onto my studio space wall. Brainstorming The Everyday next to my other projects helped me to find connections between the three.
One of the main points I took away from Friday’s class was to ‘think through making’ and to start off simple. I decided to start making a ‘tapestry’ from receipts I have collected. I used pins so that I could decide later if I wanted to use stitch or glue to fix them.
The images below are A3 photocopier experiments.
Reprinting these transactions over each other, different moments in time become merged. I think it reflects my feeling towards spending money, because I find it overwhelming when I think about how much I have wasted and about the cost of living crisis that is going on too.
After using the photocopier, I rented a projector from the library but I am waiting for the adapter cable to arrive so I can start using it. I don’t have a set plan for the projector but I would like to play around with photography, large sheets of paper and mirrors. My aim with the receipts is somewhat vague so far as I have several ideas, I want to show the act of gaining these receipts as repetitive and inescapable, but also as personal markers of a time and place.
I want to research Gabriel Kuri in the next week. He explores themes of commerce and consumerism, and also uses receipts on a large scale.
https://www.estherschipper.com/artists/44-gabriel-kuri/
love the layered receipts Oscar, this is becoming intense, keep going with this, how intense could it become over time?, just the very simple act of layering is giving you something new, transformational, unexpected? while the detail is lost we look harder for the information we can glean from the mass of data, interestingly you are simultaneously loosing while gaining data, loosing while gaining our interest. Yes they are personal markers of time, but universal too, supermarkets offer us choices, but only so many and only from within a system, a global marketplace, there are supply chains and peoples lives and deaths behind each item, look at Formafantasma and their project Cambio at the Serpentine Gallery, a fascinating project on the history and supply chains in relation to wood, I am showing it in workshop 1. Look at Sophie Calle’s project ‘Take Care of Yourself’ for an example of how far an artist took the simple starting point of a ‘letter’ https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sophie-calle-2692/sophie-calle-dumped-email.