After much uncertainty, our main focus for Beacon will now be Kelly Large's performative artwork in April; an event to highlight the tide of school children which floods Sleaford every weekday afternoon that she observed during her residency at Sleaford and Kesteven High School. Having met Kelly last week, Dan, Nicola and I have been frantically trying to think of the best way to film the event from overhead without influencing the flow of people. Our ideas have ranged from model helicopters to scaffolding to hot air balloons but we have still not hit the jackpot. Nicola has even talked to the chief of Lincolnshire police to try to commandeer a real helicopter!
The Cildo Meireles exhibition has greatly inspired my own practice – I've been reducing a sentimental piece of my mother's furniture to sawdust to make paper that the audience will be invited to take away (in a subverted homage to Feliz Gonzalez Torres) but could not think what form the paper should take. I'd been considering flick books (so they disintegrated with use, dispersing the cabinet even further), portraits of my mother, origami, and so on but Meireles has reminded me that sometimes a open ended gesture is best. If I simply allow the viewer to take a piece of the handmade paper away, they are completing the act of the cabinet's destruction without enforced symbolic meaning.
This has led me onto the second breakthrough! Having planned a solo show for April (or thereabouts) at Backlit, I need to have a second piece of work to occupy the second room…which was as far as my planning had got. Now I feel as though the first piece is more conceptually complete, my thoughts have been clearer about what this second piece could be. Having seen the Trent Mid-Point Review last week, I am inspired to be more experimental too. Where the first piece is dismantling a cumbersome object (and consequently readdressing a balance of possession as the viewer takes a piece of paper), the second piece could be collecting objects. Where my mother rejects the world around her, I can actively rebel against this to avoid the age old curse of becoming your mother by embracing society. I have always wanted to try and meet everybody in the world, so maybe it is time to try this impossible project! I'd like to turn another piece of furniture into a unit to house evidence of this…but what to house?!! A possession from every person I know/meet? The first piece is about possession as a burden so perhaps I could ask each person to give or send me an item they wish to get rid of? I'm itching to get in the studio now but I've got a difficult week of interviews and Beacon work to get through first!
