Tuesday 26 April 2011

Into Dust - The Blue Link Submission

The Link Gallery is a student curated gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University. This year it is curated by Interactive Arts student Elisa Artesero who sent out a call for submission for a week long exhibition based on the theme of 'Blue.' It could be any medium or idea but it had to be in some way, blue influenced.
The same week I heard about the call for submissions, I also ran into Tongyu Zhou -a researcher at MMU and also the interpretor at my workshop with Lu Schengzhong last year. After having a catch up and hearing about Professor Lu I really felt like I wanted to do some paper cutting again as I really enjoyed it and it influenced a lot of my work after the workshop.
Although I couldn't see a way in which it could fit into my current project I decided that the Blue submission would be the perfect time to create a piece and as we only had just over a week to hand in our work it couldn't be a side project that would take over the rest of my project - which I could not afford to do.
Because of the tight time frame I needed to really jump straight in and while working at the gallery I began to think through possible ideas - I wanted something striking and simple, and I have always been interested in using the cutouts from a paper cutting in the piece (a big part in my final Foundation piece). I thought it would be nice if I could cut out of blue paper and then scatter these on the floor beneath and I began to think of the decay that this brought to mind. I tend to go to music for inspiration whenever I am lacking and this immediately brought to mind Mazzy Star's 'Into Dust.' The song is a gentle, acoustic record and has the line 'I could possibly be fading..' which I've always found quite enchanting and mysterious.
I now had my idea and set about to create it, centring the lyric in the middle of an A3 sheet of blue handmade paper (not handmade by me however). To reflect the nature of the lyrics I wanted the to slowly disppear - as in I stop cutting out as much of the shape. This makes it harder to read and hopefully creates more audience interaction. The offcuts from the piece were then all collected and scattered on the floor of the Link.

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