Wednesday, April 8, 2009

I decided then that I wanted to do something physical to put up an actual boundary something that would stop you in your path so I decided I'd use a wooden pallet to block peoples way. I don't really know why I decided on this object I think it was because they can be very large and heavy and so not very movable also I was thinking along the lines of it representing a fence which was originally what I was going to do, put up a long fence. I wanted to experience how people were made move around it and then to take it from there.
I started thinking about putting black lines, like I did in the sculpture area, everywhere all over the limerick city but being honest I kind of chickened out of that one but as you'll see later I did come back to it in some way shape or form.
What I was also looking at was the changing borders of eastern countries. I was interested in these as they had changed so many times over the past century that I felt that it underlined the idea that these borders, these lines have no real importance but at the same time I knew that they had every importance to the people living in these countries. I decided to do a wire piece which outlined all the europen countries I layered them over and over making the outlines of europe and the countries larger and larger so it had this kind of cobweb effect. when you look at the piece you can't make out which country is which, which then removes the importance of these borders.
Ok so from there I started thinking about seperating up a large populated area, such as the canteen which you've seen pictures of earlier; I wanted to do this so I could really see an obvious effect, I wanted to examine where different groups sat, I wanted to seperate them up in terms of discipline ie: fashion, ceramics, painting, graphic design, sculpture and print, outlining their differences. But as things go I wasn't allowed to do this as the black tape would make the floor sticky or something like that.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Boundary, Boundaries: a boundary is a line that seperates an area from other areas.

Limitation, bound, border, fence, size, joint, extremity, grammer, bisector, bordering, final.

restriction, limiting, restraint, discipline, qualification, small space, confine, edges, outlines, fringes, perimiter, imprisonment, siege, blockading.

"If you work as an artist you destroy yourself. The more you work the less you exist...its easier to make art than to live." Christian Boltanski
I began at the start of this academic year with a quote from a book which we were asked to read for our course over the summer, it was by Jimmy Carr, the comedian, on the analysis of jokes, comedy and its origin. The quote I chose was "A joke is anarchic, a little scrap of chaos from beyond the boundaries of the rational, a toe dipped in the shallow end of anti social behaviour." I chose this quote because I could easily see a connection to what has been happening within art in the past century and what this quote was saying about jokes and jesters, artists are always trying to step outside the boundaries that have been set before them and are and have been seen outside the rational, showing sides of anti-social behaviour. But instead of exploring this completely vast theme my tutor advised me that I narrow it down to just the word boundaries and to look into that, so I did. I began looking at all kinds of boundaries from personal to physical and became fascinated with the idea that some boundaries are just simple lines or just an invisible line, yet they have the same importance as a giant wall so to get me started I did this line down the middle of or studio, to physically half it and to see what happened from that.

Friday, April 3, 2009

This was a quick two day project about what changes may occur in the future. Leading from my earlier project about people becoming just numbers I decided to make my face into a barcode the idea was that people would be scanned so as to determine who they were, for example going to the airport you wouldn't need a passport they would scan your face.
This was a piece I did for a project about exploring the body and the self. It is a plaster cast of my body which I later filled with the amount of water that my body was made up of and tried to vibrate that water in the cast with the sound of my footsteps ie:me using up energy.

Followers