Testing the Trolley from my film work ‘Shopping List’.
Ive been spending time over the past month working on four different pieces of work which have all stemmed from research that I did in the National Archives or UCA Archives. I have been fortunate in this time to have had tutorials with some very very lovely and insightful people, who are both visiting and resident artists at UCA.
Much of what I have been focusing on is how to present my work. How to go from a researcher, digging into areas of interest and then this forming into ideas in my mind……. to then placing this in the hands or eyes of the public or a public, and how best to do this.
I want to consider how the original research can actually inform how to place the work into the world, and how to also use the locations that I exhibit in as further stimulus for the presentation. At the end of this month I am in two group exhibitions where I am able to really consider presentation in this way. It is important for me to not only ‘display my work’, but to actually try to stimulate conversations about it and the themes behind it.
In my work ‘Child’s Play’, I am going to be showing a short series of films as part of an installation that I am setting up in the Medici Gallery (Farnham). The venue is a school and the work has come from two places in my work that are now combining. Initially I was looking at myself as an Artist ‘playing’, in specific locations that had slightly absurd relations to children’s songs or play. When I considered this alongside my research into suffragettes and the themes of power and liberation I wanted to combine the two. My relative freedom as a western female artist today, to literally ‘play’, contrasts starkly with the reports of force feeding of suffragettes that I have been reading.
I want to use the exhibition in the school to consider this relative liberation and freedom and place it within the framework of suffragettes, but I need to do this in a way that does not simply become a ‘museum’ show and tell.
Head back here at the end of June to see how I do it, and more importantly, if it works!