Continuing on from the things I had planned to write about.
- Home sickness
- How would the piece look if it was a person homesick for the city?
- Influence of Plato's "perfect horse" theory related to Rory's argument about displaying a snowball, and why I would bother making a stone look perfect when I could just go to the beach and get one.
I have started to realise that my work is not really about the beach and childhood, but about how I'm homesick for the sea. I belong there, and by placing my footprints a symbol of the beach and the sea, it's like saying that in my head I''m still there. Its like I've moved my little bit of the beach up to Leeds with me. Gary likened this to the way nature moves things around, so in the same way that shells of animals that have never lived here turn up on England's beaches, I have brought stones from the quite, peaceful beach to the busy smoky city. I have been wondering how this would work in reverse; so something distinctive to the city would be sited at the beach, with maybe a hand or footprint imprinted in it. I see a traffic cone with the plastic melted as though someone had hugged it, or a bus shelter sticking up out of the sand with bum prints in the seats.
I think this could be an interesting way forward for my work. I feel a wide audience can relate to my work as it is, but it would reach out to an even wider one if i approached it from a broader range of angles.
Olafur Eliasson’s the Weather Project transposed an experience of being outside into the Tate’s Turbine Hall. The idea of transposing an object or event into a situation that you would not normally find it is a key concept that has its roots in Surrealism and in particular the Comte de Lautréamont’s phrase "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table” In geographic terms stones found in an environment that is alien to their origins are called ‘erratics’ - Masses of stone which have been transported from their original resting places by the agency of water, ice, or other causes. But an Erratic. is also one who deviates from common and accepted opinions; one who is eccentric or preserve in intellectual character.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you reminded me that those types of stones were called 'erretics', it's been driving me mad!
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