This week:
- finished the text to go in my exhibition and worked out in what format to exhibit it
- curated and hung most of the degree show space – still need to do a couple of finishing touches but the bulk of the work has been done
- started documenting work that won’t be hung (will do the show once it’s completely finished)
- continued with collaborative book – it is also almost done, just a couple more pages to finish
More specifically, in terms of hanging the show, these are the main tasks that were completed this week:
- deciding where all the work would sit in the space, and therefore where we needed to put plinths, cabinets and shelves – we also painted some parts of the space green to move away from the white cube and towards a more museological/archival feel
- we curated the cabinet contents
- we put up the shelves, sanded and painted etc
- stuck up small steel plates for hanging paper works w magnets
- hung the few 3D pieces that are going on the wall (badger skull, piece of bone, wood, ceramic)
- hung pieces in window – one taped w invisible tape to window and one hung w invisible thread in front. I did experiment with sticking it to the window with water but this didn’t stay for long enough. I also had to attach a small piece of wood to the hanging drawing to stop it sagging
- hung the text around the space
- curating plinth clusters/collections (after chiseling some of the recent pieces out of the bowls/dishes they’d been fired in)
It has been an (unsurprisingly) intense week with the focus being pretty much exclusively on hanging the show. Izzy and I began on Monday by deciding roughly where we’d like each of the works, with Izzy’s work taking priority on the walls and mine on the plinths. (A wall was moved halfway through Tuesday so we did re-curate a little then too.) My larger water-soaked pieces I have hung in the corners of the room, giving them the feeling that they’re pushing against the architecture in some way. They’re hung slightly separated but I feel this works well in terms of a sense that they’re somehow lurking, washed up into the corners of the room, as well as giving the room as a whole some continuity. I’ve also included one of the more rectangular water-soaked pieces with my thing drawings, as well as a couple of small fragments with the plinth clusters, as a way of tying together the different bodies of work – the same processes are echoed throughout the room.
I have done a similar thing with the text I have written to accompany the work, soaking it in water as a way of highlighting the physicality of the text – that the text, too, is a thing and is subject to the same material forces that is speaks of, and that are evident in the work. This ties in, too, with the quote in the window – the backwards text from Thing Theory that, again, physically interrogates/interacts with the processes it speaks of.
My main body of work is on the plinths in the centre of the room, as well as somewhat in the cabinet that Izzy and I have curated jointly. The plinths were by far the most difficult to get right; I had brought a lot of material with me to the space, both in terms of my gathered, found objects, but also in terms of various ceramic, cast, and other experimental sculptural work. It took me a day of sifting through everything, seeing what chance connections and pairings were made, and iteratively positioning these on plinths until I even came close to a resolved display. It was particularly challenging to find the balance of the plinths being too busy vs too sparse – giving each item its necessary space while still maintaining the sense of clusters – and also of too ordered vs too chaotic a layout. Initially I was being a little more intuitive with the layouts, clustering things quite randomly, but stepping back from the plinths these came across as quite cluttered and busy. I found that using the more traditional, taxonomic mode of display – organising things into lines and pairings – helped achieve this balance of forming clusters while not becoming too busy. Even just the simple positioning of the larger items towards the ‘back’ of the plinth, so there was a sense of coherency and through-lines, helped with this too. I did find that the clusters will always appear a little busier from the side as opposed to viewed top-down (hence the success of the cabinet), so my slightly taller plinths were slightly harder to curate, which is a useful point to bear in mind for future exhibitions.
The cabinet, too, was similar in this regard. When Izzy and I curated the exhibition in the library the cabinet was perhaps a little busy as it contained the entire display. In response to this we were conscious to leave a little more space in this iteration, but almost went too far the other way, deciding in the end that the cabinet appeared a little too empty. We therefore did end up adding a few more items, but I still feel as though it is emptier than the library display, sitting well with the collections across the rest of the room.
The collaborative book also echoes this same method of working/curation, so much so that we’ve titled it entanglements in a nod to its process of creation. We again tried to walk this line between creating spontaneous, unforeseen links, while also including content from sources that are important to both of our practices. As part of this, we set up multiple collaborative google docs to collect these potential sources, from which we then selected and arranged into pages of the book:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hy8fVCtjSqcS5PYaQW3X37eVQsvusubAmS4cdDx1jOg/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h60Ob9QSzB1s1evPd84srjqfABPoLXMl_hY0lKy4fMk/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-6S5AfmWhRrjV1A4OD6jLymCh6fjEEQDM1HpXi0eEz0/edit?usp=sharing
Working collaboratively has been interesting in its foregrounding of process in this way – what is usually unseen and intuitive needs to be voiced and potentially even compromised in order for it to work for both contributors. I have found it has caused me to be more intentional in this way, planning ahead of time where perhaps normally I would think about e.g. display more retrospectively, which has been useful even just in its acknowledgement of that.
In all, next week the focus is on finishing off a few smaller details as well as preparing for assessment by documenting and writing about the work/exhibition.
Remaining to do in the space:
- display collaborative book on shelf
- take in books for bookshelf and display
- hang paper works with magnets
- any last wall paint (an extra green bit?)
- floor paint
- wall text
Other to do:
- finish collaborative book
- document all work, both in space and work not used
- title, measure etc all work for documentation
- write artist statement, exhibition summary and self evaluation
Anna Harris 