As a overall theme my practice explores the discourse and interplay between childhood and adulthood.
My practice explores how we see our childhoods, and how ‘childhood’ as a concept is seen by adults. The diagram here shows a working hypothesis that I use when exploring the themes my practice throws up. I say this is a working hypothesis because I do not claim that it is a complete truth, it is a hypothesis that is likely to constantly change as my work explores these concepts. At this stage this is the hypothesis I work with.
As it shows, our experiences as a child shape are personality as adults. It teaches as norm, beliefs and values in society, and also shapes as into the person we are as adults. The belief that childhood experience effects are adulthood life is a benchmark of Freud’s the theory. However I don’t claim to strongly look into Freud’s theory regarding my work.
as an adult our personality determines the way we view our childhood. What we exaggerate and what we play down. It shapes the our memories.
So it is in a constant cycle.
However our adulthood perception of our childhood is likely to be influenced by TV, books, media and having children of your own as well.
As a overall theme my practice explores the discourse and interplay between childhood and adulthood…it looks at addressing, not so much, what we have lost from our childhood…i.e. the fact that we are no longer children…but rather what we perceive to have lost…how we remember our childhood, how we remember the hopes and ambitions we had, and how we relive memories, shading over some aspects and exaggerating others.
The discourse between actual memory and perceived memory in my work lead to a subtheme that underpins the themes of my practice. This is a play between fantasy and reality. What is fantasy and what is reality. How fantasy can become a reality though the incoherence of our memory. E.g. as a child I always thought the corridors of my primary school were massive, like never ending spaces, with giant stair cases…common sense tell us this is not true, however my memory of my primary is as such, so does the incoherence of my memory make it a reality? If my primary school was to be knocked down, and here was no pictorial evidence of it, then my exaggerated memory of the space become the only interpretation of the space we have, so it become the reality.
The theme of fantasy/reality can be further broken down into two sub – subthemes…which relate more strongly to the technical production of my practice, i.e. performance…these are fantasy and the everyday.. so how fantasy intercepts our everyday lives as adults…and game play and reality…i.e. how we can turn games that we play, or even played as children, into a reality of adulthood.
To demonstrate the theme I have just talked about, I am going to look at two recent performances/ video based installations. The first is a performance filmed in may 2010, and a video based installation installed in December 2010.
The performance was called, ‘Cowboys and Indian’. I did not perform in this myself, I instead used six actors. The performer were asked to play a game of cowboys and Indians in the square of game in Chelsea parade ground. I chose cowboys and Indians as it was a personal favourite game of mine when I was little. I built a number of set pieces to create a staged environment for them to play around. These were all made of 12mm MDF and were 2D held up on stands. There was two explosions, four cacti, two trees and a tepee. The performer were required to play for 10 minutes. I gave three the roles of cowboys and three the roles of Indians. The only rule was that they shout ‘NAME…you’re dead to someone’ if that person heard that they had to lay down and count to ten before they could get up and continue playing. One player was given the title sheriff, and one player was given the title chief. This was an experiment to see if these perform took on an authoritive role. This didn’t happen, and as a result highlight a key difference between children and adults acting as children. the performance was filmed on four cameras at each angle of the square.
Later in December I used the films to make a video based installation. I want to highlight a key point here, that I was not just showing the videos of the performance. I make a strong point in my work that the videos I make are not just film of the performance they are a new genre of art, and as such need to be view in a different light. Themes and issues brought up in the original performance may be different in the installation following it. The installation was entitled ‘The Good, the bad and the Chelsea’ and looked at the domestication of the games, or more specifically the way that adults still play the games we played as children, just in a more controlled environment… a more mature setting for the same game play. The set pieces for the performance were turned into furniture, the explosion into a cupboard, the trees into a hat stand and the cacti into a coffee table. The video were played at random timings on four TV, so that all the sound overlapped each other and create a sound like a children playground. It gave the effect of looking onto the performance, but not knowing specifically what was going on. It made you feel like an outsider…or a grown-up watching children play.
The second work that I am going to look at is a performance filmed in march 2011, and a video based installation installed in the same month. The performance was called ‘A124 School’. I did perform in this one and took the role of teacher in a school that I created. It was based roughly on my secondary school, and looked at a childhood desire I had to be the teacher…mainly so that I could write on the whiteboard and tell people off. I used four actor to play the roles of students. There were four lesions, each an hour long, they were English lit, art, languages, and history. The performance lasted from 9.45am to 3.45pm, and was filmed on one camera, first at the back of the classroom, then at the front. The room was set up very specifically to resemble as class as possible to a classroom.
The video-based installation, installed in the same space a few day after the performance looked at memory of my time at school, and how there memory were rose-tinted and uncertain. It also looked at how these memories influenced the ‘A124 School’ performance. There were five videos in the installation. One in the classroom, that you could listen to through headphones that was an edited film of the ‘A124 School’ performance. On the teachers desk there was a laptop playing a video off ‘you tube’ of my secondary school in 1998 that someone had filmed…(these was two years before I started there). In the store room, (which was blacked out) was three video, one was me talking about memories of school, one was talking about facts about my secondary school these two were played at the same volume over the top of one another, the last one was me sitting at the teachers desk listening to Jerusalem, my old school hymn. This was played at top volume so as to drown out the others. The difference in volume was to highlight the uncertainty of the memories.
Jessica Voorsanger is an artist that we myself and Natalie did some work with in December 2010. we participated in a video that she was filming for a commission at Peckham space called ‘Peckham Heroes’. We sang karaoke dressed as famous people from Peckham…
Her work has influenced my recent work, but not so much the work I am heading toward for degree show, more work I am produced separate to this…however technique I like the approach she takes to her work, and the way her work has a light heartedness to it.
The following is a clip from the channel four comedy ‘Smack the Pony’.
I’m showing this because It works as a major influence on my work…maybe not that obviously, but I think it’s the subversion of the everyday with the un-ordinary.
This is a screen shoot from my blog, which talks about my work and its development…I try not to focus on research or influences on this but rather focus on how my work is progressing and the technicalities of make it…
This is my research facebook page. I use this to write about influences and exhibitions that act on my work…it is also a place where I can write about exhibitions and books etc, which helps to get to grips with them…I used facebook as it is a good communication tool, and it means I can get feedback etc from other people.
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