Project Room…….

This week I have been in the Project Room at my University , which is a large, empty exhibition space, and have found the time to be very useful. In all I have spent three days in there, playing around with four different ideas and concepts.

 I feel this was a brilliant time to spend in there as I have my end of Semester  assessment in just under 2 weeks.  I spent the first day setting up the space, where everything that could have gone wrong went wrong…but that’s technology for you!

Eventually I sorted everything out and started about setting up my first installation.  This involved a projection of images onto the gallery space wall of all of my old staircases in black and white, with the sound of footsteps ascending and descending played off a speaker system and amp in stereo.  This idea came to me when listening to a piece on You tube called Virtual Barber Shop(have a listen), it plays with your hearing perception and it gave me the idea to play the sound in different speakers, one ascending and one descending, to give the illusion of a virtual staircase, it needs work, but i’m on the right path. 

Then along side this was a tape player placed in the centre of the space, with headphones to listen to the tapes scattered all about the exhibition space floor.  On the tapes are memories, mine and other people’s of staircases.  

 

This over complicated the space though as it is a very  interactive piece.  I then moved this element into a booth, which I created outside the exhibition space, with 3 8×4 flats painted black on the inside. I placed a table and lamp inside and set the tape player and headphones up.  I scattered loads of old cassette tapes about the floor also, this seems to work much better in this space, and works well as a installation in its own right.  

Once I had had some feedback from tutors and friends regarding the installation inside the exhibition space, it became evident that I no longer needed to overcomplicate the space, and am now convinced that the minimalist approach is needed for the piece.  I set about editing down my photographic slide show of my staircases from childhood and concentrated on my first staircase, Bryn Dyfi, as I felt this is the staircase that holds the most memories and has the most feeling attached to it.

The sound element of the installation also works well with just these first stairs as the sound of footsteps were recorded onto to my wooden stairs at home.  It felt confusing and contradicted the sound element.

I have had very mixed feedback, from people saying they don’t understand it, to somebody saying in comment book, that they believe this is the stepping stone to a wonderful career in conceptual art!! Ha! 😀

Today Im showing a film of my family and their memories of stairs, in the same exhibition space, so far so good! Some lovely comments about this too, but will let you know about that later……

Refining ideas….

Doing this project has taken over my life.  Every day I do something related to it, whether it be researching, blogging, filming, or coming up with new ideas it’s totally absorbed my imagination and my determination to actually pull something off that could in fact be quite interesting is making me very confident in my abilities….(thank god!!) It’s taken 3 years but I think I may have turned a corner.

Filming…

I’ve decided that along side the photos of my old houses and the memories I’ve collected from other people that I should also make a film.  

I began by going back once more to all of my staircases from 0-19 and simply walked up them.  I believe that this combined with footage of myself and my family talking about memories will be a successful element of the installation, and now I’m beginning to think about how I could show this….

1 Wesley Terrace, Taliesin Aged 5-10ish…

I lived here with my mum and my brother after leaving our first house in the same village.  My mum was skint and we had to move out and find a smaller house so we lived here, an end of terrace two up two down with what i thought had the biggest cupboard under the stairs EVER!! This was in fact not true as when I returned it was tiny.  I would spend hours in the cupboard playing and making up imaginary places, and playing with my toys.  

The stairs didn’t spark too many memories for me, but I did feel a connection.  I felt sad, and sat there for a while pondering what I got up to in this house. 

When I was little I hated sleeping alone and often, well almost every night, would creep into my mums room and sleep with her..(sorry mum).  There was an old woman who lived next door and the walls were really thin, she would sleep in the day and be awake at night I was convinced she was a ghost as she would never be seen in the day time.  She would bang and crash about her house and the place you heard this most was on the staircase.  

I would sit on the top step listening and really wanting to stop but something would keep me there, listening intently scaring myself rigid.  I shared a room with my brother at the time and he would encourage the fact I thought this old lady was a ghost and this freaked me out even more! 

I remember lying in the bottom bunk in my bedroom and calling out for my mum,  I must have been about five.  She didn’t answer it seemed like I was shouting forever. I eventually went downstairs and crept into the living room and she wasn’t there.

I had a massive crying fit, and screamed the house down I ran up the stairs to tell my brother and then ran back down and fell most of the way down. My mum ran in the house wondering what all the screaming was about, she had actually just been in the mobile shop that used to come to our village to buy some Monster Munch(not sure why), anyway I then sat with her while she comforted me and ate her Monster Munch.