COLLABORATION PROJECTS REFLECTIONS

'The Wall'

This cross course collaboration bore some interesting results as far as the means of collaborating with a subject that can sometimes feel so distant to fine art, the concept and ideology behind the piece of work was quite hard to express at first as the graphics students were thinking in a rather literal sense rather than delving a little deeper into the thought process. Expelling this their literal approach to the project brought my level of conceptual thinking to a rather rational level, which allowed me to concentrate on the actual creation and practicality of the project rather than the meaning in that time. The collaboration offered an insight into how two like-mind thinkers in the sense of social and environmental views can think so alternate in terms of practise and work process. 

The project itself is just the start of a concept i want to take further and eventually make it into  community event in which people from all walks of life whether they share the same views or are just lovers of art take part in a large scale clean up on the beach. the cleanup would entail collecting all the man made materials across the whole beach and creating one large scale intervention on the site that would act as a great reminder of how much waste these people have been ignoring for years. The intervention would eventually be reclaimed by nature but before hand the sculpture would evoke this great message of what needs to be done to ensure we are doing all that we can for the natural world.

The images taken on the day of the project portray the nature of how we tried to manage the practicalities of creating the wall with some images bearing reminder that we are indeed not just artists but human too, so by leaving in the selfless, candid images it bears reminder that not only someone who thinks in an artistic socially positive way can produce and help.

'Glitches'

Using the public and the public realm to comprise a collaborative project is a bit of a risk as it takes away the literal definition of the word but still in turn acts as a collaborative public art piece. This project hasnt been documented or even wrote about as much as i have planned, to me it lives on through the concept and can act as an art piece alone as i ask people to think about the non-everyday within their everyday, proposing a question of how we can look at the world differently and find these glitches that occupy our reality. By doing this it will create thousands of alternate realities for each individual so there can never really be one set aspect to document. This is something i have thought extensively about and is something i want to develop as i am yet to fully understand my own concept and theory let alone ask anyone else to comprehend it fully. The question i am asking myself is what physical things can i create which will have the same effect as to what i am proposing the audience or participators do with their mind.

As the hallowed institutions make viewing art a luxury to much of the modern western world as well as the freedom to make and express the artists views and conceptual reins, what happens when we take away this institutional grip and enter into the reality that is the everyday. Fragments and harsh realities can be portrayed through the artist and their work but when it is situated within a gallery space surrounded by like-minded thinkers does it have the same impact as opposed to when placed within the public realm. Public art is a reflection of how we see the world, the artists response to our time and space running parallel to the audiences every day. When art is placed within a public space it combines the artists vision and views with our own sense of who we are relieving the constraints of corporate power and hierarchy. We search to create something more socially positive, something more critical and something more real than art. The question is can this be achieved by unlocking the constraints of institutions and allowing the art to live and breathe within a space that feels more natural, more accessible and in which it belongs within the community for everyone.