While working on the power point presentation I learned a lot about my work over the last year. I had to really think about my practice. What is pushing me to make the art that I make? I did a slide show, starting from the beginning of the year. I began with the first object I found outside. It was a photo which had just recently been taken. I kept it not really knowing what to do with it. A few weeks later I decided to frame it and place it back where I found it. At the time I was interested in putting back these items to the environment I found them in.
The previous year my practice had been focused on interventions outside. I was still attached to this idea (and still am) but I realised I began to see these objects I collected as precious. They eluded to the personal life of a complete stranger. Many of the objects I collected tended to be personal. A child’s glove, a friendship bracelet, a little toy, a photograph etc. I also noticed I have been amassing more childhood objects than I first realised. The danger with these objects is that they hold very strong associations that, as an artist, you need to be aware of. But for me, the interest in them lay in their ephemeral quality. Children go through things a lot quicker (meaning they also drop things a lot more easily!). Barring one or two toys, children rarely hold onto things and yet as we get older, we form more and more attachments to the mundane items that surround us in our everyday world. For some people it even turns into a hoarding condition!
I recently went to see the exhibition, ‘Song Dong : Waste Not’, at the Barbican. The exhibition consisted of all of the items the artists mother had hoarded throughout her life. The activity of saving and re-using is in keeping with the chinese adage ‘wu jin qi yong’ – ‘waste not’. After the Second World War the Chinese along with the rest of the world were in a state recovery. This meant everything had to be saved and everything was precious as you certainly didn’t know if another war was on its way. However after his father died his mothers hoarding was got much worse, most likely from the trauma of losing her husband. Apparently the artist, along with his sister and wife, set each exhibition up and take each one down, meaning that “memories are rekindled and personal family objects are rediscovered, bringing powerful emotions to the fore”
While walking through the exhibition, you are first struck with the sheer volume or items. Where exactly were all these stored for instance?! Then you begin to notice how personal some of the items are. She had kept all of her husbands clothes, which you see in the exhibition, neatly folded. She had kept all the baby toys, all the empty toothpaste tubes, all combs, everything you can think of was kept. I began to realise that her fanatical need to preserve things, in order to be reused, was only part of the hoarding problem. The other part stemmed from her fear of losing memories.
Isn’t that why we keep many objects to begin with? We have certain memories attached to them. When we see them again, the memory gates open and allow our brains to remember a place we thought we had forgotten and when we accidentally throw something out or lose something precious to us, it feels like a loss of your memory and it can be devastating. This is almost entirely universal and it is this concept I am intrigued by in my work.
It does of course cross into the sentimental region, which is a very tricky line to cross in art. I am learning this the hard way but Song Dong managed it in an understated and organised way through his presentation of the work. I am hoping to achieve something similar for my final show. You begin to realise how presentation is key to what the viewer perceives and takes from the show.
No comments yet.