For the crit we had two days to come up with an idea of how we going to display our work together in a gallery space. We had to work together to get the best out of our work and the space we were displaying in. It was a good experience communicating our ideas to each other and be confident doing so. Sort out our differences and argue our points across. I actually deep down enjoyed it but it was a bit stressful because we had two days to do it.
At the start I was concerned as I didn't have anything to show as my work is site specific and I cant just bring it to a different space or recreate it as that would take away from the piece and the idea. I make work and then decide where it belongs or while making it in space it belongs, so it felt a bit forced to show all of a sudden in a gallery space. I prefer displaying elsewhere, and if my work does not suit the gallery space I will not show it. And just because I was asked to show in the space as everybody else, I wasn't going to quickly come up with something that is completely not my practice. I decided I am going to stay true to my practice and if some idea came up then ill do it, if not then not and I would have to at the crit itself explain myself and my practice and why I wasn't showing. My work is quite intuitive and in the moment so I was definitely not going to go against that.
The first thing that we did in the space is discussed what kind of work everybody are thinking of putting in the space and then people who had work already brought it to the space and we tried to see links between them and discuss them. Slowly we started looking at the space itself and considering where the works will go. From the start we have all decided that we aren't going to use the white wall on one side of the room as we wanted to think about other ways of displaying. Thinking outside the box. The space itself is quite big and spacious, with a white wall running on one side of the room and glass windows on the other. A lot of light and brightness which was great. There was also a statue already present in the room which I found very interesting.
We started getting plinths out and trying to put work on top of them, experimenting the setup of plinths in the space. We started to put them in line and seeing how they work together.
Slowly I started to see a link between the statue right at the back which was already there and the plinths. I proposed to the rest of the group to maybe put the work in line with the statue. It works better in the space and is visually pleasing as well as includes the statue as piece of artwork and as part of display. There's also another link, the statue looks like its sitting on a plinth so visually all the sculptures that we also place on the plinth work visually together. It makes sense and I think it works. However I didn't think drawings and paintings worked on a plinth and slowly I was starting to think that maybe there are too many plinths as well, and maybe just the statues should be on the plinths and that's it. However we did all want to place our work in line so now we had to think about non sculptural art and where to display it.
After a while after some discussions we started to think that maybe the works were too straight in a line, looking too strict. To soften a bit we decided to play around with the plinth, turning them diagonally, on top of each other or making a domino effect with them by making them look like they are falling on top of each other. However we still stayed with the idea of a line that ran from the statue. We added movement and life to it without changing our aim. Still I felt that there were too many plinths, and because they are quite sculptural themselves they look like they dominate the work. Maybe it is also to do with the colour of the plinths. Maybe if we painted them black it would bring the work out more.
I also felt that it was a bit empty around the line of work. I knew that we decided to use the space itself as our guideline of how to set up our own work but maybe that made us too focused on the line and therefore we forgot about the space that surrounds our work. This is where I thought of how I can change that and suddenly I knew what I would do as my interaction and contribution to the space.
As you can see we chose to stay away from the wall and closer to the windows and that made me think about how I can bring the outside in. I decided that I will collect leaves and scatter them round the space. I wanted to change the whole gallery experience for the audience. Make it more interactive. I wanted for people to walk on them.
In my opinion the leaves bring everything together. Both filling the space, interacting with the work through the colours as well as with organic theme that seems to run quite a lot in the works too. It also creates interesting juxtapositions such as the metal circle which is man made and lifeless, contrasts well with the organic leaves. The leaves also bring out the colours of other pieces with similar colour, they bring each other out.
The leaves are randomly scattered however you can clearly see its boundaries and the gallery boundaries. You can clearly see where the display starts and how we decided to section out the space. Staying away from the wall and being closer to the window and working with parallel lines of the building (the pillars that run in line, the floor boards, the windows, the ceiling details that are right above our linear setup).
Overall I think it was a success especially when we had 2 days to do it and we didn't know each other. We had to work fast and communicate well with each other to achieve this. Yes there are things that could have been improved and reconsidered, however based on how much time we had, we did really well.
~ Ev
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