Group A: 5m pres:
Bring your up-to-date module proposal. What’s your main challenge? How are your current practice and journal tackling it?
Up-to-date module proposal
I plan to discover the potential ways in which play, and a sense of place, can connect and what this can mean for the person experiencing this moment. Then I want to explore how these ideas can be channelled into a physical object which encourages a person to experience a sense of place through ludic actions. This has been influenced by two main points:
*** my ongoing interest into practices arising from the Situational International organisation, who were inspired by the Surrealist’s integration of play within practice and the SI’s consequential utilisation of play for questioning the framework of society.
*** Wanting to make an interactive object which is both thoughtful and playful.
I would like to create an item which encourages the audience to reflect upon their own sense of place – either with where they are currently situated, a place they wish to hold onto, or maybe a hope for the future. Essentially, encouraging a personal navigation to the potential comfort we can feel when we consider our connection to a place.
I hope to continue creating the short, one panel illustrated stories I have been creating since the end of the Mai 150, which are based on memories from my own childhood which are fragmented and seem to be from a child’s perspective of digesting situations through an imaginative alternative view of the world. This is to strengthen my writing and visual storytelling, as well as allowing myself a place where continued print and book experimentation on smaller projects which is continual and open to fresh ideas.
I have begun to process what it is that repeatedly draws me to concepts such as a ‘sense of place’ and ‘mytho/psycho-geography’ throughout this time on the master’s course. I have come to two main reasons:
* Their combinations provide a space in which to navigate a reflection upon identity and/or culture (either our own or another), in a way that I feel has a tangible outcome. For example, with mytho-geography, you can drift from the physical landscape, into imagination, and back to the place. Here this magical in-between place can be prized open which can strengthen the connection to the land.
* The potential to articulate playfulness and imagination within more grounded or serious concepts (displacement, trauma, repair.)
I think that young people would be an appropriate audience for the focus of my 170 project.
Despite a ‘sense of place’ would be quite a complicated subject for a young person to articulate, providing young people with a feeling of security and giving them agency is important within developmental years. Maybe there is a way to provide this through visual cues and thoughtful questions which never mentioned “a sense of place”.
I am imagining that the final product will be modular and open to audience input. The hope is the encouragement of fun and allowing imagination to settle in.
What’s your main challenge?
- Deciding whether to integrate the activities with my short stories, or to have the two components separate
- How to incorporate the interactive element of the activity book – will it have blank pages, or a recipe sheet at the beginning, for example?
- Sourcing enough activities for the book. Not sure how many I would like to use yet. List incorporates some psycho-geographic and other site-based activities. Finding it difficult to find a comprehensive list of the above so currently it’s a bit of research from publication + generated ideas from observing my own and others practice/ workshops .
Current practice:
Images from sketchbook / desk:
Current research journal:
For drawing/ structural help:
- Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series by Richard McGuire – for a glimpse of quickly resolved narrative
- Toutes Les Mers Par Temps by Alex Chauvel – for an illustrative approach to storytelling which relies on the conventions of mapping
- Pretending Is Lying by Dominique Goblet, Here by Richard McGuire & Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi– to see families interacting with one another in domestic / everyday environments in graphic novels
- Design As Art by Bruno Munari – from the viewpoint of an interdisciplinary designer, which speaks of materials, audience, and general professional/ life experience.
- 1st-9th June – in East Anglia with the plan of visiting some memory locations and drawing from life.
For a wider scope of personal positioning :
- Keeping regular check on East Anglian socially engaged practices and events as well as participating in Cornish ones too.
- online meeting with artist Genevieve Rudd
- online lectures about psycho-geographic and/ or play-orientated creative groups ( Theatre Mundi (France), Trust In Play (Greece) )
- Also compiling a list of potential play- orientated companies (whether that be organisations, toy companies etc) around Europe for the potential of utilising the university’s Work Abroad Scheme