Week 1, Term 2

Cardboard build

Looking at the theme of ‘Safe Space’ while developing ideas for our own practice, being inspired by Emily Speed, making mind maps, playing with cardboard and scissors to build something we can wear.

Week One, Term Two: 10th Jan 2017

Emma is going to be encouraging us this term to start developing ideas around our own artistic practice and we started today by looking at the process of exactly how we do this. She asked us to think about the idea of ‘Safe Space’ and explained we were going to be making a cardboard build around our own body.

To look at this in context we talked about how Picasso made maquettes out of sticks and pieces of wood, and then went on to look at contemporary artist Emily Speed who, amongst other things, builds full sized sculptural ‘costumes’ from cardboard and other ephemeral found materials, which are designed to be worn on the body. We looked at her work called The Committee, a collection of three costumes worn by women.

We also talked about the work of various philosophers and poets who have been inspired by the idea of spaces and what they signify, for instance Gaston Bachelard, who wrote ‘The Poetics of Space’ and used metaphor to describe how inhabited space can transcend geometrical and physical space, and how our perceptions of space can affect how we feel about it. We looked at A A Milne’s poem ‘Halfway Down’ describing how Christopher Robin liked to sit on a special stair, about how in Charles Dickens ‘Little Dorrit’ a prison becomes a place of safety, and how W B Yeats wrote about Odysseus finding a safe place but knowing he had to leave it.

We started making mind maps on ‘Safe Space’, although my own mind maps are not very conventional as I prefer to work in a more linear way with written ideas divided into different subheads and categories alongside sketches and visual notes.

Emma had asked us during the week to think about a home in which we had/have a happy space, so I continued with this idea. I concentrated on thinking about my flat in London where I lived for 17 years, about the wonderful shape of the hexagonal hallway and all the rooms leading off it. I thought about the light, and how the sun used to come in through the dark blue Venetian blind in the bedroom and make stripes on the wall. There were a lot of ‘safe’ and happy memories, both of the spaces there and of a particularly special person who shared it with me a lot of the time.

I decided to make a hexagonal shape from the cardboard which would fit around my body and somehow get the light to enter through cuts, or windows on three sides, symbolising the south facing aspect of the flat. I made a pattern from newspaper first, working exactly as I do when I design and cut patterns for clothes. Then I cut out the cardboard. It fitted around me, but keeping it in place involved the addition of shoulder straps which, although practical, I felt were a detraction. The main problem was that I couldn’t keep my arms outside the hexagon as they then flattened the shape! Thanks to Leonie for this photo, even though I do look rather silly!

Roll up, roll up… hexagons for sale!

After the class had finished I continued thinking about combining ‘Safe Space’ with my hexagonal shape idea, and worked on it some more during the week. It was suggested to me recently that I should take some photos of my sketch/ideas book and add them to this blog, so here’s a sample page to show how I’ve been developing an idea for a piece of work based on a hexagonal box. To see the results please have a look at the portfolio too (Safe Space Boxes and Safe Space Hexaflexagon).

A page from my sketch book