This project was run in conjunction with the piece-mould workshop. My initial thoughts were that it opened up all sorts of opportunities, the brief allowed for many different ways to approach the project with many examples being shown. It was important to not only create a sculpture that is relevant to the site in some way but also to have created initial drawings, then create a model and looked at measurements of the site and any issues that may arise. With such an open brief the opportunities were abundant, so why was I finding it difficult to commit to an option and start creating. I need to treat it more as a task and start doing something. The final piece could be small, large, tiny even or only present for a moment, longer term or permanent.
Examples shown by our lecturer, Desmond Brett, included work by Cristo and Giuseppe Penone.
Giuseppe Penone, Alpi Marittime—Continuerà a crescere tranne che in quel punto (Maritime Alps—It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point), 1968/2003, tree, bronze; arm, 15 3/4 x 4 x 5 1/8". Installation view, Maritime Alps, near San Raffaele Cimena, Italy, 2008.
Christo. Running Fences (Project for the West Coast of USA). Collage 1972
22 x 28" (56 x 71 cm)
Eduardo Chillida, Peine del Viento, 1977, San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain.
Other pieces shown and discussed were by Cornelia Parker's Black Path (Bunhill Fields),
2013, a cast of the path at William Blake’s grave. Doris Salcedo's, Untitled, (2003), a piece of work that takes approximately 1,550 wooden chairs and stacks them between two buildings at the 8th International Istanbul Biennale. Salcedo comments “evoking the masses of faceless migrants who underpin our globalised economy.” This piece follows a previous work that placed 280 chairs at the Palace of Justice in Bogot “to pay homage to those killed here in a failed guerrilla coup seventeen years earlier.”
My initial idea was to use a space on St George's Street, a piece of land that is left empty, apart from three trees. It sits outside of the West Garth and I wondered about using it in some way. I wondered if I could find out more about the space, as it would have originally been part of the Dominican Friary dating back to 1226 (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1220456).
The Halls, St Andrew's Plain, Norwich, Norfolk, NR3 1AU. Indicated in blue. The area I was interested in is the 'garden' shown in grey and bounded by a wall here indicated in blue.
Having looked more of the history of the building I feel there is more to discover and also to see if I can reflect some of the history of the building. Perhaps one for another day, it is a fascinating building.
However, I recently had an issue at home where we lost the phone lines for nearly a week, which meant no phone, no internet and barely a mobile signal. I managed to relocate a few times to continue my studies but also discovered there was a BT 'Hotspot' not far from my house. I could get 4G, I even joined a Group Tutorial, sat on an old fishing stool, phone and earphones, notebook on my knee. Open to the elements. When I had finished I took a few pics as the whole experience seemed very strange. I have since thought about creating an installation of an office set up, chair, table, phone, lamp, bin, laptop, etc. but with no way of any of it working, connecting.
I was looking to focus on the issues of being remote and communication. Although being 15 miles from Norwich is not considered remote compared to many parts of the country or indeed the world it did highlight the constant need for communication and networks. I felt adrift and very restricted, limited in what I could do and access.
'It’s also a well-established problem that many of the world’s poorest people do not have the means or technology to log on, with just 31% of people in the developing world using the internet, compared to 77% in the developed countries.'
Mobile connections, meanwhile, rely on cell phone towers. And these can have an impressive reach. “Two years ago I was in the Sahara, and for quite a large amount of time I had access,” Graham-Cumming says. “It was patchy and slow, but it was there.” Indeed, many developing countries, especially in Africa, rely predominantly on mobile connections for accessing the internet.
Google recently announced plans to tackle remaining internet deserts through its Loon project, a group of giant balloons that will fly at about 70,000 feet (21,000 metres) and deliver internet to rural or disaster-stricken areas.
I started to look at the site I had used and could get 4G, observe the telegraph pole and connections, the spaces and location. I started sketching a few ideas also considering communication devices I had at home, including all their relevant connectors and chargers I still had, even if they would no longer connect with anything.
It was when I started to look at the negative spaces between the wires that wondered if I could represent these as solid areas. I decided to make a quite large maquette to see how it could look and any issues it may present. I cut a selection of pieces of aluminium into random shapes and then found a pole, that needed cutting, sanding and staining before cutting slits into it. I then inserted the aluminium segments into the cuts to see how they would work and whether they would stay in place or need fixing.
Once I had created the object I wanted to see if by photographing it in a certain way I could deceive the scale and give and impression that it was a larger than it actually was.
On reflection I may not actually create a larger version but see if I can superimpose this in the space using Photoshop and give it an air of vastness.
I feel it conveys what I wanted to but also it looks like a dangerous weapon, sharp, barbed, cutting. All adjectives that could be applied to certain pieces of communication; trolling on social media, cyber bullying in the workplace, extreme media reporting, comments made at a distance that would not be made face to face. Maybe it is better to be isolated and remote and not be subjected to something that is very difficult to filter.
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