13 Nov Power Cut & Curiosity
I set the relational objects up in the sitting room at home when the project in Craobh Rua was complete. I identified it as something to explore in my Playbook Part 1 – what would different contexts do to these objects. What would they be used for, just ornamentation or would they begin to fit in – become part of the movement of people and things in our home?
During a power cut everyone flocked to the one room. Candles were lit and I documented the space. The candlelight animated the objects in a different way. Their surface was more apparent.
Caroline spoke before (maybe Year 1) about those objects that people situate on their mantle piece. How they have attained a status of importance. Yet here the offerings are overlooked by the audience, the objects are intermingling, coexisting with the overriding presence of the digital. These images are reaching for something, trying to describe something within my practice.
My family of relational objects situated within my own (post humanist) family and I am audience. Is my work about families? Long lost, constructed, immediate, ancestors, participants (like the Mother & Toddlers), groups (families) of objects, relations between them all and the space they occupy.
I began mapping and reflecting on the objects in room in my notebook. Surveying, recording and trying to understand my personal connection while exploring it creatively. Giorgio Agamben’s quote from The Cabinet of Wonder (featured in Curiosity) “This is why the individual objects seemed to find their meaning only side by side with others, between the walls of a room in which the scholar could measure at every moment the boundaries of the universe” seems apt in this moment.
Following on from Caroline’s lecture on Monday: Simon O’Sullivan seems to be saying that the temporal state, the embedding of movement and change and state of flux that a diagram can propose are qualities that can set it apart. Maps are fixed and plotted, drawings are expressions of something, whereas the diagram can act as a proposal. I will continue to dig deeper before arriving at a diagram.
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible” (Pg 221 Curiosity -Feynman)
References
Dillon, B (2013) “Essays at Curiosity, or eight ways of looking” from Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing. London, Hayward Publishing,