Situate Workshops
This started with 5 labs of creative responses to provocations delivered by established practicing artists. The first was a site specific response, in which I spent time in an outdoor area and made something creative out of what I could find - it was a bright orange plastic netted fabric wrapped around a broken seat. I and my collaborator wove in hydrangeas to spell out the word ‘QUEEN’ making the broken seat more a defunct throne.
The second provocation was to create something out of cardboard. I cut pieces into relatively straight and equal pieces and tried to use them to depict something. I abstracted the architecture of my home, turning the aspects into a flat and graphic line image. I did this wall by wall until I compiled a small collection. I put them all together to create a Mondrian style graphic image. I then embroidered the design onto a piece of calico.
The third provocation was an exercise in graphic dictation. As I am not a music based practitioner I tried to further the graphic exploration I undertook from the last activity. I was given a mirror and a leaf and was asked to mark make, my idea was to use the shape of the mirror which was a square, and let the leaf be an agent for the creative response. I developed this into an instructional art piece in which the mirror is traced around on a piece of paper then set to the side, the leaf is dropped onto the mirror and wherever it lands, a mark is made on the paper counterpart. The participant must tally the hits and misses (as in, the amount of times the leaf lands on the mirror or does not), and when the misses outnumber the hits, the artwork is complete.
A complimentary piece to this was to create an inventory of the marks made on the mirror (scuffs, scratches, fingerprints etc.) and translate that into an artwork.
For the research and development I undertook after these provocations I intended to use weaving as my medium. I undertook material based explorations, seeing what I could conceptually apply to the fibre, the structure, and the juxtaposition of materials. I looked at elements of chance, elements of structure and allowed the fibre to have a sense of agency and use how it works as a conceptual vehicle.
This stage of the project was involved with letting the material become the catalyst for an event. This aspect introduced the idea of hostile design as an activating agent of transformative processes - interacting with these works is supposed to change you in some way. Some had dangerous material incorporated in it, others had were expected to disintegrate on engagement. Others blended the two and had an intended consequence to destroy itself and the audience with it.
