Monday 22 June 2015

Romance of the Fragment.

The title of this project I found to be far more thought invoking as off the bat I had a plethora of different ideas to sift through. Many of these ideas involved breaking fragile things and re-arranging them in a different manner that tells a story or pens across a point. Again however this felt generic and repetitive so I began looking for a more personal way to respond. I was attracted to the idea of an overwhelming amount of small things or parts being a part of my work, as the idea of many fragments that can perhaps be interacted with seem like they would develop a far more personal and charged response with a viewer than perhaps a singular object that was off limits or out of reach could.

At the time I had been talking to old friends on Facebook, and reminiscing about our time at secondary school which brought up a lot of memories I had neglected to recall upon. In retrospect I felt like I had been a bad person to allow some things to happen, including just not talking to many people I had previously been good friends with. This sparked the idea to go back through my friends list and write down something I felt bad or guilty about, towards or associated with each individual. I wanted too keep it anonymous, associating no names with each note, but I could associate most notes with the person I had in mind afterwards.


When I showed these notes to my group I received a very positive response with people commenting with how they could relate to many of them. I found this encouraging and proceeded to create more until I ended up with a pile of around 250 apologies. After seeing them purely from material stand point I thought it would create an interesting contrast to experiment with putting a similar string of text onto a metal surface. I experimented with what to put on the metal and decided on the phrase I'm not sorry any more as it continues to contrast the content of the paper notes. The process of making them was quite repetitive not only because the message is repeated but because it's a repetition of the same motion bringing a hammer down on top of a letter press over and over again to imprint the message, and then spending time filing down all the edges so they were smooth and safe to hold.



















People responded to the metal notes saying they felt more like dog tags due to their shape and size. the phrase written on them at first was not intended to be repeated across all of them, but after writing it once it looked strong enough to keep repeating. The outcome for me never felt as charged as the paper notes yet was still engaging enough when presented alongside the original paper apologies.

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