Health and Safety

I had a chat with George Robertson about how I could logistically get over a few obvious health and safety problems with building the trap. He was very helpful and encouraging and saw no reason why I couldnt make it so long as I made a proper risk assessment and consent form. However an evening of trying to consider all possible risk did seem a little stressful and I have been left with a slight ponder about how necessary Health and Safety is. Right on cue came an episode of Panorama on exactly this subject. It can be watched here.

Back to Trapping

Ive turned my attention back to trapping and Id like to make a large version of the self-setting mouse trap pictured here. My problem is with the legality of trapping people which I am currently trying to find out more about. So far all I can find is wikipedia information which discusses american law and can be seen here.

Sixth Sense

Perhaps the future?

pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense

Cumbernauld Hit and the Underpass

This term has been my most successful so far in terms of professional development. As well as the experience of organising a work for the mezzanine exhibition I also got some experience of helping Neville Rae, a GSA graduate with two projects. The first was helping with an exhibition in Cumbernauld Town Centre in the vacant shops and the second was a mural painting on an underpass in Greenfaulds. From both I got an idea of how it feels to recieve comments and talk with the public about an art project. I realised that people are much more accepting of art projects than I imagined. From the mural painting I had some particularly impressive experiences. The first was from the act of physically changing a familiar landscape and the realisation that a built environment is not a prescribed certainty, but a changeable and malleable place. My interest in creating work within a specific town has been developed and strengthened by this. The second impression was from watching the way the mural painting was made in conjunction with school children. This was done to reduce the likelihood of the mural being defaced and, though I doubt that intention will succeed, I think the idea of using art to create a pride in a landscape for a community is very important. In particular teaching children that they have the potential to change their home town to be the place that they want it to be.

What Now

I have some idea of how I want to continue. I know I still want to make traps and I now have an interest in 'decoys' and how they work too. I think there are a lot of pre-existing traps that people could be made aware of through sculpture and I think there is a great breadth of space for consideration in the moment that you realise you have been trapped or tricked. It has a way of making you assess your own actions and reconsider how to live in order to keep from being tricked again. I think thats a really interesting head space to be explored: The concession that you still need to adapt.

The Sculpture Diaries

I was recently watching a programme on channel 4OD which discussed the history of sculpture in relation to women. It was really very informative and led me to find out more about the venus of willendorf. Click on the picture for more details. Theres an article about the tv programme here.

Mike Nelson

Following advice from my tutor Ive been looking at Mike Nelson in terms of creating a submersive installation that develops as the viewer interacts or moves around it. Theres a good website if you click on the photo and also a good article about Mike Nelson here.

Mezzanine Exhibition

Following the exhibition at school I was invited to participate in a flat exhibition. This was a great opportunity and very useful for my experience. As well as getting a chance to show my work to more people I learned something about how to create a work in a short space of time (1 week) and as a result of that I learned the strength of having thorough investigation in a work to fall back on.

As the installation was created to be specific to its space I couldnt recreate it for the exhibition. Instead I took some elements and tried to apply the ideology behind the installation to the new exhibition.

I took the cow as the main focus again but this time the context would be to encourage people to feel closer to him. This time the context would be hinted at but not made so clear.

The cow could not be fixed into the floor like last time so making a plinth was necessary. I tried to make a plinth with a space at the front so that it was an invitation for the viewer to join him on the plinth but instead it made the sculpture look more dynamic as if it were moving or about to move. To remedy this I added footprints to the front as a further prompt. Standing with the cow was a strange thing as he is much shorter than most people and the distance that was forced by the size of the plinth didnt make you feel so much close to as too close to the sculpture. It was now invading your private space.

To create an outer context I wanted to use the existing means of manipulation in galleries (the alcohol) to manipulate people to feel closer to the cow. To do this I made up beer bottle labels which each showed the cow holding signs that had emotionally blackmailing messages:

'he beats me'
'take me with you'
'i heard nothing'
'leave now! its not safe!'

Its still too soon to know exactly how well this piece worked but there are details that I was quite pleased with, for example the fact that the cows fingers covered some of the lettering on the signs made the signs look like they were really being held by the cow. This helped to make the signs appear to be the cows messages and not messages by me being held by the cow.

Crits and Exhibitions

I finished the installation project with an installation that I was mostly happy with. There was a crit of the work followed by an exhibition. From the crit it seemed apparent that a lot of the considerations of the work were evident in the final piece though it fell down in believability. People said that they didnt feel they were under the influence of laughing gas because of the size of the room and lack of sealing of the air in the space. An aspect that I hadnt realised was that people considered it an attempt to make the innanimate cow sculpture happy, despite his frown being painted on. So inevitably the understanding that people could be under an influential force like a gas was pretty quickly dismissed by the audience. What did work well though was the use of object, sound, light and space to lead you and to reveal aspects of the work in parts.
So from this I was left with two aims: 1: to create a more convincingly manipulative context and 2: to continue exploring how to make people fall in love with the cow. After all, it proved quite popular even without the later conviction that you maybe only liked it because you had taken in some laughing gas. I was even told that some people were having photographs taken with it.