Brynglas Road Aged 9-14

Yesterday, I visited the third staircase from my childhood, Brynglas Road in Llanbadarn.  This experience wasn’t as surreal as the first staircase, and felt happy as soon as I entered the hall way.  Immediately as you step through the front door you are met by the staircase.

The hallway is tiny, probably about the size of a large pizza box flattened on the floor….you would have to let the person in, make then stand to the left, then shut the door then they could enter the living room, It was that small.

 

Immediately I had memories of sitting on the stairs talking to my friends for hours on the phone.  Sitting on the stairs with my friend Eve, swapping shoes and stories….

Sitting at the top of the stairs late at night after having a nightmare, and my brother shouting at me to get out of his room, when all I wanted was a hug…sob

I felt the feeling of being alone on the landing late at night when everyone else is fast asleep, a lonely feeling, that makes you think you’re the only person in the whole world who’s awake.

Influences….

Rachel Whiteread…..

British artist Rachel Whiteread is best known for her sculptures which typically take on the forms of casts, and she was the first female artist to win the Turner Prize.

Many of Whiteread’s works are casts of ordinary  domestic objects, and in most cases the space the objects do not inhabit,often termed the “negative space”,  instead producing a solid cast of where the space within a container would be.. particular parts of rooms, the area underneath furniture and so on. She says the casts carry “the residue of years and years of use”.

The Poetics Of Space – Gaston Bachelard…..

The Poetics of Space is a book by Gaston Bachelard published in 1958. Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture basing his analysis not on purported origins (as was the trend in enlightenment thinking about architecture) but on lived experience of architecture. He is then led to consider spatial types such as the attic, the cellar, drawers and the like. This book implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture.

It’s really amazing! It looks at how we experience intimate places, and takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, it shows how our perceptions of houses and the spaces in them shape our thoughts, memories and dreams…quite arty farty, but it’s a really enjoyable book, and im sure it’ll help me with my project.

Ceal Floyer…..

This is an Installation piece by Ceal Floyer of a staircase of speakers playing the sound of footsteps. Really simple but so effective which is what I would like to appropriate for my piece.

Ceal Floyer’s clarity of thought and the elegantly concise presentation of her ideas resonate through all areas of her practice. The deceptive simplicity of the work is informed by Floyer’s particular sense of humour and an awareness of the absurd; her use of double-takes and shifting points of view forces the viewer to renegotiate his perception of the world. Floyer often uses everyday or readymade objects, exploring the dialectical tension between the literal and the mundane, and an imaginative construction of meaning.

Sarah Sze….

Sze’s sculptures are flowing structures consisting of an abundance of small-scale household items that respond to and infiltrate the surrounding architecture. Like the information flow of the World Wide Web, her compositional language takes form by successively linking small bits of discrete information into a complex network. With an intensity born of a laborious patchwork technique that is at once painterly and sculptural, the interplay between individual components and overall structure allows Sze to explore the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Simon Woolham….  

http://www.darkcorner.co.uk/

He is concerned primarily with occupied spaces and the personal and shared narratives that unfold in them. His drawings of school playing fields, junked underpasses and the like often contain text with the tone of dialogue. Through these glimpses of speech the dilapidated environments come to life in a skint version of enchantment: a tree stump or a broken fence are filled with the meanings of the events that go on around and about them.

In his attempts to unearth this unpredictable and fragile process of memory, for the show at Bloc he will use biro drawings, model interventions, animation, video and text that focus on recurring motives in his work: ditches, unofficial dumps, breached security fences. His work is unassuming, quite often made from simple materials and with seemingly modest aspirations. It is their quotidian qualities, however, that charges them with emotion, not that those emotions are easy to identify.

Janet Cardiff….

Cardiff’s installations and walking pieces are often audio-based. Janet Cardiff’s work depends on the active participation of the viewer /participant for its full realisation. The voice of the artist and scenes taped in the library are layered onto the visitor’s actual experience of moving through the physical environment of the library. Cardiff confounds our sensory perception and consequently our ability to perceive reality. The experiential nature of her work allows a more direct connection with the artwork than is typical in a museum. In selecting the library as the location of her work, Cardiff explores our relationship to books, another medium through which our imagination can be transported through time and place in the pursuit of alternative realities.

 

Recording Memories…

As part of my installation piece, there will be a sound element .  I envisage this as being in the cupboard under the stairs.  I’m not quite sure how i will set up the sound yet but i thought the best place to start was by asking people about their memories.  

Last Thursday I went around the School of Art armed with a voice recorder and asked people if i could record their memories of staircases, the memories were really touching and i was really grateful to those who left them.

However, after i played them back they sounded too stiff, too rehearsed this was because i asked the person if they would read their memories once they had written them down for me. At first I thought that this was the way I wanted them to sound, like telling a story.  

Whilst listening to the memories I realised that I had switched off and afterwards thought that the best way of recording memories is to do it in a natural way just like having a chat because the part that is interesting about this is the person remembering the memory, the ums and ahhs, the laughter, if makes the person and their memory more real i guess.  This is part of the process though getting it wrong modifying and starting again, its all about trial and error.

I don’t know how to set up the sound recording yet, but I did think about having the sound coming out of a old fashioned phone but after considering it i think that it would be too much, making it more about the old fashioned phone rather than the sound.  I think i’ve finally discovered in 4 years of studying art that it’s so much more effective to keep things as simple as possible, less is more.  So, maybe i should just play it off a small speaker system, i’m not sure yet but the exciting part of the process is in experimentation. 😀

My Staircase. Aged 13-19

 

The other night i went to my old house from when i was 13, to take photos of the staircase. Ty Pen Cwm Canol in Llanrhystud, a beautiful old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, inglenook fireplace, slate slabs in the kitchen, wooden beams, slanty celings that kind of thing. I loved this house. It was the house i lived in from age 13-19 and the house i guess the house i lived through my ‘evil’ teenage years.. It was a happy house, a warm and inviting house. The memories i have of staircases in this house are of sneaking down them late at night to catch a snog off my boyfriend Rob who was sleeping on the sofa, but id have to jump the last few stairs as these were the creakiest ones. I’m not sure if i have as many memories attached to this staircase as others, possibly because i was never there, and always out with Rob no doubt. The feelings i had towards this house were much happier, the house hadn’t changed at all, it was fresher in my mind i suppose. I almost felt like the lady who lives there now was trespassing, and i really wanted her to leave! I asked her if i could stay, she said no.

So there’s only two more houses to go, which i’ll be visiting next week 😀

My First Staircase. Age 0-6

So as part of my research process I decided that the first thing I should do was to go back to all of my old houses to take photos of the staircases that hold so many memories.  There have been four in all each with different memories and feelings attached to them.  I went back to my first ever house, the house i lived in from 0-6. It felt really strange, almost like an outer body experience(not that i’ve ever had one) the stairs were exactly the same, the stairs my Dad had made 27 years ago!! It felt tiny,  and the rooms I once remembered as being enormous ,were actually really really small and the ceilings really low. The house had three floors each had wooden floors, and fire places.  The walls were stone with white washed walls and sash windows.  I remember sitting on the windowsills for hours waiting for my dad to come and pick us up for the weekend, sometimes id be sitting there for hours, sometimes he’d never come.  The rooms were pretty much empty and one room in particular had no furniture in it at all, mum said it was because she couldn’t afford any.  As you walked in through the front door directly in front of you was the staircase, it was an open staircase with gaps in between each tread.  This staircase led to the bedrooms. The other staircase led from the middle room with no furniture, down into the kitchen/sitting area. In this part of the house was a fire and the place we’d snuggle up with mum before going to bed 2 floors up, through the middle room with no furniture and up the creaky wooden steps.  I remember mum used to say “Up the wooden hill”, which  at the time wasnt very comforting.  The feelings that came back when i visited this house were of loneliness and i didn’t really feel much, no connection. I guess maybe because this was the house my Mum and Dad split up in. The house that my mum tried to keep on for us, even though she had no money, maybe my mum felt lonely at the time and this, without intentionally meaning to was the atmosphere in the house. Perphaps she was lonely,i don’t know I’m no psychologist, but i think there may be some truth in the way i felt then, and still do now to a certain extent. I remember sitting at the bottom of the staircase alone, nobody else was there. I was 4. I remember i was wearing a blue pinafore dress and there was a biscuit on a small plate infront of me. Straight ahead of me was the solid wooden front door, it had a small pain of glass, i remember the light streaming through it. I remember feeling sad and lonely.

Visiting BrynDyfi has made me think about what the house represents in my memory  as well as the staircase and that anything can take on an enchanted significance.  Whether it be a cupboard under the stairs or a hiding place you used to go to when you were little.

 

A starting point…..

I’m currently in my 3rd year studying Fine Art at Aberystwyth University! It’s going really well, and I’m now starting to think about my final exhibition which shows next May.  My chosen module for this year is Contemporary Concepts and Practices, for which I intend to create an Installation piece based on Staircases, my memories attached to staircases, other people’s memories and so on, attaching my memories to architecture.  

Also, i feel this piece is about space, the seen and the not seen. I’ve recently been reading a book by Gaston Bachelard called ‘The Poetics Of Space’ and have found it extremely useful and interesting. It focuses on how we experience intimate places in the home, how anything can take on an enchanted significance. It’s helped me think about things differently, not just the structure of the staircase but the space around it, the past and future, imagination and loneliness of it.  

I set up a Facebook group to let people know what I was doing, but have found that after a short space of time, that becomes quite stagnant. I’m hoping this will be ongoing, and will serve as an excellent way of showing my tutors that I am consistently working on my project and also serve as a brilliant form of online diary…..

Will add photos and things when i get to grips with Blogging! 😀

My first blog…

So, this is my first ever blog.  In all honesty, I’m looking blankly at the screen with no clue of what to do! But i’ve been ensured that it’s quite easy once you get started, so this seemed like a good a place as any to start….