As part of the course there were 4 projects to choose from for the first semester or so. Different projects to suit different practices and how people work. I chose The Laundry Project. As part of the project as a group we had to visit nearby Industrial Laundry where we communicated with the people who work there and explored the space in order to start and develop our research and response to the place, history, experience or the people that work there. It was an open project where we were led by the experience of visiting this place.
My first visit consisted of me just exploring the space and putting down notes about what I am interested in. My first impression of the laundry was that it is not an art space and that it might be quite hard forming work. On my first visit ideas didn't form and I found that quite frustrating, however I did not work that way before, it was exciting and different. I had to remember that ideas will form when they are ready to form and that I have to trust myself. Responding to this sort of environment is what I needed as I already decided at the start of the second year that I will try and move away from studio based work and space and try and work elsewhere or form ideas elsewhere as I believe that studio space is quite restrictive. Maybe that is why I decided to choose the laundry project. It is a non art space which has a different kind of opportunity and approach to it.
Notes I made on my first visit:
My first reaction was to figure out what I was interested in most, the people or the space. After that I decided to compare my interests in both categories. I realized that although I wasn't particularly interested in the space itself, how it looked, what it had there in terms of equipment and procedures, I was still interested in the clothes they sort out and the process the clothes go through especially the ones with stains on. I cant say that I was particularly interested in people either. I think that I became interested in the people bringing the clothes in and then leaving so me as an art student couldn't see them, so the clothes were the only things that linked me to their owners. I guess I became interested in the unseen.
I realised that yet again my love of stains and marks is very strong so I decided to start working in that direction. The more I thought about stains on clothes the more I realized that it wasn't just stains I was interested in, but also the people who created them that I never got to see in my visits to the laundry. The stain itself has a story, a captured moment in time that happened to its owner. Obviously stains are unwanted and people wash them off, that is why I thought of maybe capturing stains somehow before they perish. For the next two weeks after the first visit I have talked to the laundry staff and arranged visits in hopes of taking pictures of stains on clothes and keep the connection going with the people there. However I wasn't so lucky, I was informed that people don't come in with a lot of stained clothing and that they usually don't inform the staff if their clothing is stained too. I visited a couple of times and the only stained item that I took a picture of was a mouldy white shirt which wasn't that impressive. Apparently the owner left the shirt in a car for too long and the stains cant be removed. Unfortunately I could not have the shirt.
I wanted to work with the laundry however I couldn't because my work would only be photographic as I cant physically engage with the clothes. So I had an idea of going to near by charity shops and asking them whether they will have some stained clothing that is about to be thrown away. The charity is a Cancer Research trust, where the staff sort out the clothes that come in themselves and then place them on shop floor. I spoke to the staff and they informed me that sometimes they do get stained clothing which is not suitable for sale, so I gave them my number in hopes that they will ring me when they have some.
This was a completely different situation than at the laundry and I didn't know how to feel. Both gave me opportunity and something different. If I got some clothes from the charity shop that meant I can physically engage with that piece of clothing and experiment with it for my project. For example my plan was to thread around the stains and then wash them off so what is left is the threading that I did. My input of preserving the stain. I started to think whether to know the name of the owner is important to me or the story behind the stain. There are a lot of opportunity here but I have to focus on something and develop it and not jump from one and the other which I kept doing and which stopped me progressing.
To consider:
-why am interested in the boundaries of stains?- process and stories
- do I have to know the story?
- consider installation work?
- Chiharu Shiota
- Susan Collis
~ Ev
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