Open-Cut: research and practice unit induction project

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This induction project sets out with a common brief of four weeks to open up new directives from the work. It asks you to excavate the surrounding territory of your art practice, dig up ideas to find what lies close to the surface of the work. Allow unfamiliar veins of thought, materials, research and process to emerge through your experimentation. The most important part is to be curious…

This is the prompt we were given, and it is surprising how fast four weeks go in terms of developing a response! When the project was introduced, we were encouraged to look around us for things that might have been ignored or have become so familiar as to render them invisible in our daily lives. Coincidentally I had just been given a bag of old toys by my Mum having cleared out her loft recently. This made me reflect on my response to these disparate items and put me in mind of Winnicott’s notion of the Transitional Object. These were things that were linked to my ego and identity formation.

As I was mulling this over as a direction my research about digital afterlife took me to a concept I hadn’t come across before but which I found fascinating – ‘context collapse.’ As someone who has preferred compartmentalising my physical social communities the fact that these communities then collapse into each other in my digital life was something that really resonated.

Broadly, context collapse refers to how people, information and norms from one context seep into the bounds of another… (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014: 477)

The collapsing of social contexts has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves.(Davis & Jurgenson, 2014: 476)

This was something I really wanted to explore and felt like it was close enough to my areas of practice around how our digital lives are impacting our social and cultural practices, but it was a new area to think about and explore how I might respond to the concept.

Context:

1. the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning
2. the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs

Collapse:

1. to fall or shrink together abruptly and completely: fall into a jumbled or flattened mass through the force of external pressure
2. to suddenly lose force, significance, effectiveness, or worth
3. to fold down into a more compact shape (Merriam Webster)

It was the idea of collapse that particularly attracted me as I could imagine something quite visual around images collapsing into each other. I went back to my photo archive and started to explore a way of collapsing them together, a good night’s sleep and my out of consciousness brain came up with exploring Tyvek printing.  

…after a period of tight focus on the problem and just before the aha! moment occurs, they [neuroscientists] observe a state of brain relaxation, which loosens the tight focus and makes the brain more likely to make new and distant connections between previously unrelated areas. Relaxing the brain’s focus then, seems to be essential for insight. (Psychology Today)

I like the idea that my relaxed brain was working on Open Cut for me, scraping away at what I had learnt and making new connections under the surface, for me to explore. I had used Tyvek before in some of my creative destruction experiments, it is a treated paper that can be printed like ordinary paper but reacts to heat and is untearable, so it is used a lot in textile art. I came up with the idea of trying to shape and mould the Tyvek into vessel shapes that, like wilting flowers, were collapsing in on themselves. I also wanted to respond to my tutorial with John Bloomfield (Curator, Wysing Arts), about finding an approach to degrading my images that was more arbitrary. Finally, I went back to my map of Internet Metaphors and the idea of ‘threads’ and ‘stitching’ came up which sent me in the direction of making image patchworks using the Tyvek.

I printed a selection of images taken randomly from my archive, trying to include all aspects of my creative practice from drawing to still life photography. I printed them double sided on Tyvek and cut into squares which were then reassembled by stitching, while I had some control on the front images, I didn’t necessarily know what was on the back, my first act of randomness. Using a combination of different bowls to try and mould the images they were then placed in the oven. There followed a series of experiments as I discovered the effect of different heat settings and timings. One piece got hot very quickly and frazzled into a small curled object that became quite solid!

I worked on different size pieces and although it is a very unpredictable process, I was happy with some of the larger pieces, they were achieving just what I had hoped for. I liked that they had become slightly otherworldly, like odd seed pots or carnivorous plants. Something I have since realised is that I should have taken before and after photos of the process!

Feedback and reflections

I find the crits quite an intense experience, in a positive way, because there is so much to absorb and think about. I am seeing new work, experiencing multiple perspectives, thinking about how I articulate my own work and listening, listening, listening! In the moment, I find it hard to hear feedback (literally rather than defensively) for my own work and this time I wasn’t sure how much I recalled. Turning to mind mapping I was relieved at how much emerged that I can now work with. This ranged from acknowledging personal responses, to presentation and thinking about how much to show and how much to tell the audience. I am aware that my work is often conceptual but, in this instance, I think I was happy for people to just see them as interesting objects. If they wanted to know more about my intent that was great but not essential.

 I really enjoyed seeing some people’s response to the materiality of the vessels and when someone said ‘I feel like I want to touch them’ I thought why not! It was a new experience seeing my work being handled and one I really enjoyed, I like that people were interested enough to want to engage with them. I take on board that the audience would not have got my intention from just seeing the vessels and I had a good discussion with Lee Maelzer afterwards about how whether that mattered or not.

I agree that the large white plinth was too heavy for the vessels and confess I hadn’t really thought about the relationship between the two beforehand. It is something I will give more attention in future. I am not sure suspending them is the right solution but maybe a slender Perspex plinth or shelf would work better.

It was illuminating that R saw them as almost geological, that they had a shimmer from where he was sitting. I think this ties in with the notion of Open Cut and my own sense of excavating my archive.

I am left mulling over the big question of how I might develop this work from here – given there is a limit to the capacity of my domestic oven! Several things were suggested like building a bigger series or working with a heat gun. I wonder if there might be something around placing several inside each other like nesting dolls. I also have a vision of people being able to walk inside them in some way. Lots to think about.

As with our first group project and my paper dresses, I found myself standing back from the ‘vessels’ and wondering who this person was that had produced them. I am so animated by what is opening up and how each new project pushes me further. This echoes my experience of a recent painting course and continues to highlight the value of experimentation and play.

References and citations

Davis, J. L., & Jurgenson, N. (2014). Context collapse: Theorizing context collusions and collisions. Information, communication & society, 17(4), 476-485.