AFTERWARD

Look here to see what I am NOW doing with SOME of the ephemera that makes up the Wrinkley's Playhouse.

The Story of my Degree Show, 2008 to 2010 (and ongoing)

It is August 10 2010, almost exactly two months since the wonderful opening of the WRINKLEY'S PLAYHOUSE at NCAD in Dublin. (See end of post for slide show)

The excitement of the day has subsided, but I still feel passionate about what I did, and am looking forward to exhibiting part of the show again at the RDS in November 2010.

FIRST THOUGHTS
The story of the show began back in late 2008. In the course of a family gathering, one of my offspring made the commont that if I didn't clear all my 'junk' out of the attic soon, it would break through the rafters and come crashing down to kill me.
Obviously my face showed horror at even the thought of disposing of what I had been calling the 'family archive', so someone else suggested 'sure you could make a piece of art from it all'.
A simple throw away remark, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, though I had no idea at that time how it might look.

KABAKOV CONNECTION
A few days later, I was leaving the college library when I spotted a book waiting to be re-shelved. It was called "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away".

This image comes from this website

I could only borrow it for one night, but even a brief read filled me with inspiration, especially with the idea that 'junk' could indeed become art-work.

NOTEBOOKS (all images are loaded as small, but just CLICK to see full-size)
By December 2008, I had begun to record vague ideas about how the various items might possibly be displayed.

I was reading everything I could lay my hands on regarding Ilya Kabakov, and his work was definitely influencing my ideas.
I liked his writings and interviews about the idea of a TOTAL INSTALLATION where the viewer would enter a world created by the artist. I began to think about the space I would like, and how I might locate items within it.

Around Easter 2009, we were invited to submit proposals for the second part of our DEGREE SUBMISSION - the THESIS. Eventually, after much discussion and research, I wrote about both the work and words of Ilya Kabakov from a transactional analysis perspective.
What I wrote was useful because it kept the focus close to what I wanted to do in studio.

THE WORK BEGINS - June 2009
When Summer 2009 came, I had unexpected help from a lady from France, Laurence. She wanted to improve her English conversation, and agreed to work with me for a few weeks.

On May 30 2009, just before Laurence arrive, I wrote in large letters in my visual diary:

Eventually
SOONER rather than later,
I need to DECIDE
what to INCLUDE,
What NOT to include, and
What to DO with what I deide NOT to include!

Little did I think I would be still struggling with those very decisions, even now (August 24 2010) over two months after the degree show.

It was Laurence who did trojan work with me bringing down the items from the attic.
We never counted the number of boxes we brought down, but when I say that at this stage (August 2010) there are still about 45 unopened boxes, and that what we opened filled the exhibition space, as well as a large part of our front parlour, you can imagine how much there was.
The process of opening the boxes began at once.

Laurence and I also spent a lot of time discussing what form the Degree Show might take.
One idea was to have some kind of CEREMONIAL FIRE, with a new me rising symbolically from the ashes.
I like the kind of 'gormless' look on the face of the Phoenix - In a sense that's quite like the innocent/naive way in which I have approached this entire project - and in a way the old saying is true for me:

Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise!

Other ideas we discussed included:

• Paper the walls of the house with all the sheets of paper in the boxes
• Make a performance of the opening of the boxes (which is part of what did happen)
• Make a time-line as a sand-track, marked with items from the boxes and performed as a 'walk' (this became a reality when I did the 'Disentangulation' piece on the stairs at the Mill Centre in October - though without the items from the boxes)
• On Skype, Joey suggested making mobiles, and incorporating wind and light. (I did include this, though without the wind - maybe I will get around to this later.)

By June 10, I am showing signs of being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the stuff we have brought down. In very large letters, I have written:

NB Too much is TOO MUCH!
Isolate one idea
I can't show EVERYTHING
I NEED to CHOOSE
Too many messages, kill the MESSAGE.

In other words, I was trying to tell myself - Less STUFF, more IMPACT.

One glance at this sketch shows I wasn't getting my own message!
Of course most of these ideas were discarded, not necessarily because they weren't good ideas, but simply because I didn't have time or space to accommodate them. It is nice to see that the vertical hangings were there from the start, as was the stack of unopened boxes. There were only three screens in the end.

Still in June, I had a tutorial meeting with Anthony Hobbes, and he liked the way I was thinking. He asked me to consider whether the final show might be suitable for display in my home where the items had originated. I was taken by this idea, and gave it very serious consideration for several months. But in the end, logistically there simply wasn't enough time to mount a display of that magnitude in the few months left to me after the thesis was finally submitted in February.

But I am getting ahead of my story. Back in June, Laurence and I were having endless discussions about what the theme of the exhibition would be, and how the performance might be integrated into that theme. We thought of burning thing, of burying things, even of simply packing them away in boxes as a farewell performance. We considered shredding or perhaps tearing up everythinginto small pieces and creating a thick carpet like autumn leaves.

We thought about SMELL, whether to include herbs, or to include burnt paper as a source of smell. In the end, I didn't add anything, and several viewers commented that the place smelled like their attic at home, so I was pleased with that.

Still struggling with lack of clarity as to whether this piece was going to be about saying good-bye to the objects, or to my own past, or to create a history display, and how might I do that as art rather than as museum - I had come to the last page of the first of seven notebooks. On the last page I wrote:

A main part of this WORK is for me to "make myself HAPPY" to resign as the "keeper of THIS archive!!!
And added a note to "Beware not to be a teacher in my art-work"

It was still only June 8 2009.

On June 8 I asked myself an important questions that would eventually feature as one of the layers of the final piece. I wrote:
Q. WHAT might be guessed about WHO lives here from the "traces" they have left in house and gardens.

A few days later on June 11, exactly one year to the day before the opening of the DEGREE SHOW at NCAD, I made a kind of mind-map that showed some of what was going on in my mind at the time.

Interestingly, there are no more entries in the visual Diary until June 29 (but plenty of photographs showing that I was going places with Laurence as well as working her very hard.

The MindMap of July 6/7 not only looks a bit calmer than the one made nearly a month earlier, but click on it and you will notice the small sketch showing that I was sitting on the swing seat in the sun when I began working on it.

The other point to note is the comment in red with an asterisk on it: *Beware self-indulgent inclusion of some items. I was beginning to think more logically, it appears.
I said Au revoir to Laurence in early July, and have to admit that I missed very much her structured approach to my ideas, and the way she let me away with nothing.
Before July had ended, I was already beginning to plan MEMORIAL, a tribute to my mother on the 30th anniversary of her death which would happen on October 27 in the middle of the night.

And I was looking at the way Kabakov displayed his pieces of ephemera and wondering what could I learn from him.

I drew sketches of my ideas - remembering as I did so my first NCAD tutor in Core Year. Over and over Millie Cullivan would say: Don't tell me, show me. How important these words became for me as I learned to think through my pen, just as some years earlier I had learned to 'think through my hands' when typing on the computer.

The first sketches of the CCTV rig appeared August 14. The basic concept was the same, but the final device was very different. Of course I already had some slight experience of using CCTV as it had been part of my BALANCE installation and performance at the Back Loft Gallery at the end of third year.
Now I had received the news that I had been accepted to show again at the Claremorris Open in September.

True, I had much of the work done, but I was buzzing with new ideas, so that cut across much of the thinking about the Degree Show for the next six weeks or so.

All during August, I toyed with  variety of display ideas:











--------------- Material below this line may be out of order -----------------------

It has been written when it came into my head so that I wouldn't forget it.
It will be edited into place as the Narrative unfolds.

SUBSEQUENT COMPARISONS with KABAKOV
It was quite a while before I began to see clear differences between what I do, and what Kabakov does.
To begin with, his medium, although similar to mine, is quite different. In his case, his 'garbage' accumulated without his planning that it should do so, whereas mine was very consciously 'saved', you could even say 'hoarded' principally because I loved the items so much that I couldn't bear to part with them.

Another difference is that Kabakov uses fictional narratives to carry his work, whereas, I am most interested in historical narrative.

One of the common traits we have is that we find value in things that most people regard as useless, and only worthy of being discarded.
We also use labels on many of the objects the objects. In my case, I have two types of label - one type gives objective information about what the object is, where and when it originated, and perhaps who used it and for what. The other type of label may express what I happen to be thinking about the item at the time I am labelling.

It is possibly this element of personal revelation that is key to what I produce. The sub-title of this piece of work is 'An unvarnished self-portrait'.
My hope is that as viewers wander among these items from all the stages of my own life and that of my parents, they will come to have an idea of the kind of person that I am.
I aim for total honesty - what you see is what you get. I do not remove items from the collection unless they belong exclusively to someone else.
Things are the way they are, and that's OK with me.

Another aspect of this work is that I want it to be totally interactive for the audience. I invite viewers to touch and handle the items, and to move them if they think they would look better somewhere else in the display.
And the display changes whenever there is a performance as some of the contents of the box that is opened is added to what is already to be seen.

I am present with the exhibit much of the time, available to answer viewers questions, and delighted to receive their comments and suggestions.

(to be continued)

THOUGHTS THE EVENING BEFORE THE SHOW OPENED

Thursday June 10 2010

Am wondering what my mother was thinking this evening in 1936, the day before she married my Dad at Visitation Church in Fairview. Did they have a rehearsal, or was it like one of my performances - a rough idea of what is going to happen, but open to change and surprise.

The two of them have been very much on my mind as I prepared this piece, and their wedding photo is one of the images on display.

It was nice to come into the space after Joey and to follow him around. He first die an overview and spotted the sections - the CCTV, the Scrapbooks, The Albums, the Museum in my head, then the vitrines and lines of my father and mother's stuff, across from the jumble of stuff from my own married life, the unopened boxes in the corner, and finally, the documentation area with the set of videos and the notebooks and ideas books.

Joey took a number of lovely pictures - hope they look as good in reality as in the camera.

This was him looking at the detail. He stopped and said: this makes me feel like it used to feel when I went to the attic.

He said a lot of nice things about the lighting - like someone's living room - that is just the effect I wanted to convey - a sharp contrast between the harsh modern light of the projector at the entrance, and the quiet tranquility of the display area.

I like the CCTV images too, since although the light is hard and white, the images projected are almost pastel, and particularly looked at through the strips of plastic attempt to convey the idea of looking through the mists of time.

Anthony was around and looked tired this afternoon. He mentioned taking a rest - I hope he does so.

He said he was happy with the marks given and would be prepared to defend them if there was any dispute.

He said no one failed, but whatever way he said it, I wondered if anyone had been deferred by the examiners, rather than by their own decision, as in T's case.

B is the one I am most concerned about - he was very ambitious in what he attempted, and didn't keep records so they have no real idea of the work he put into it. I hope he gets through, but if he doesn't he says he will come again in September.