Tuesday 15 February 2011

Lost object idea


I have discovered that I am a perpetual hoarder, or at least that is what my mother has taken to saying about me. I felt that this quality within me needed to be embraced and used to its full potential, thus I have started to collect specimens which take my fancy from off the floor of the streets. Prime examples of the most commonly found things seem to be keys and babies shoes.

These objects are so very rich in mystery and having talked to various people about what could have happened to this seemingly dull piece of rubbish, it has become clear that normally the item would not have registered within the viewers thought processes, unless to think about how there is always rubbish being dropped, or that society is really going down the pan. I intend to create a version of a story about the found objects to help people to begin to look at how rubbish and lost items on the streets can be looked at in a new light. Hopefully educing some flow of imagination and emotion for the brain to indulge in as people go about their everyday lives.

The idea of the piece is to only collect things that appeal to me so I can produce my own story for it, but from this as a beginning then the viewer will hopefully begin to produce their own stories. Being a habitual Internet wanderer I often come across websites that are completely built up from people adding there two pence worth. This made me think about how it could be a lovely thing to ask people once they have visited my original starting items to add their own, to create an encyclopaedia of stories and objects.

Developing this idea further, the fact that my sister is an English teacher is another avenue for the production of stories, and having liaised with her, we have developed a lesson plan for her bright year tens. They will use one of the traditional learning games that force them to look into connecting words. So the basic idea is that they are given a connecting word (for example, however, therefore, moreover) and have to build a paragraph using it at either the beginning or the end of a paragraph of which the subject will be one of my lost objects. This will be undertaken in groups as having talked to a researcher from Bradford university the ending results generally will be more interesting, not only for me but also for the pupils who take part in it.

Alongside this angle of attack I feel that with websites such as Wikipedia and Flickr booming at the moment this is the perfect time for me to start playing with art that involves people imputing via the web to create a final piece, although I do realise that I will need to look very carefully into controlling to a certain extent the contents of the stories so as they can be enjoyed by all ages and backgrounds. This is a skill that I have never had to develop before and will be the main challenge within this project, and a challenge, which I do not look forward too.

Getting to the final presentation of the lost objects along with their stories from various sources, I have toyed with the idea of suspending the lost objects in mid air in jam jars so that they can be seen from all angles. Along with this, the positioning of the jars will relate to the area in which it was discovered so that the themes of the objects of different areas can clearly be seen. This simple method of sorting should give the viewers an almost personal connection to the objects because undoubtedly some of the viewers will have been to some of the places the objects have come from. Another possibility is too present the objects in cases as if they are being kept to be displayed to people door to door. Fitting the inside of a found suitcase with sectioned areas along with a piece of glass/Perspex over the top will give the impression that these things are desirable and have worth as they can only be seen and not touched.

All this is fore thought and needs to be reined in, as the stage I am actually at with this piece is trying to get the stories produced by strangers, A have the stories written by the school children, and have been writing to the organizers of various creative writing groups on the internet, which have rather ironically ignored me entirely. So at the moment to tackle this difficulty I am concentrating on improving lostobjects.co.uk by learning by myself some very basic website design, and developing a very concise introduction.


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