Taking photos in the studio to catalogue everything there, day one…Working with my collaborator Andrew, we turned the cameras on our immediate environment to see what caught our eyes. We each worked with our own camera separately, then put our results together at the end. After considering various approaches to shooting such as employing generative methods (formulas, fractals etc) and/or performative aspects, I wasn’t able to settle on anything. I felt the most appropriate way forward was to shoot with ‘fresh’ eyes, seeing what we notice, and how the banal is transformed by photographing it. This is the approach I most often take in photography and a way of thinking that I aim to impart when working with community groups. It’s a refreshing way of looking at the world and I think the other methods, at this stage at least, may have felt restrictive or muted.

On reviewing the images, we decided that they could be roughly split into 3 categories: objects, textures and splashes on the walls. The ‘splashes’ category includes paint, as well as left over bluetac, masking tape and drilled holes. Andrew seemed to be mostly interested in objects, standing further back from what he shot, while I got really interested in close-up macro images.

Below are the results from our first day of shooting.

Objects:

 

Splashes and hole in the walls:

 

Textures:

 

There is some cross-over with the ‘textures’ and ‘splashes’ categories. ‘Objects’ is what most closely resembles the work of Sol LeWitt and Harry Watts. However, as I was shooting I found that what grabbed me the most was the splashes (as you can see by the resulting number of images).

The splashes of paint and the holes drilled in the wall seem relevant to my work more broadly because they speak of the surrounding processes and structures that exist in art: the bits left over on the edges, evidence of what happened. Although accidental or vernacular, they can also easily be appropriated into the art itself – art about it’s own making – because of their aesthetic appeal. In fine art, artists often make work about process. However in collaborative and inclusive practices, the process is very different, and I argue it is often diminished in order to legitimise the art-objects (and steer away from other fields such as social work, community development, the care industry etc). I am interested in making art about the process of making collaborative art (so as to expose and elevate these processes, the things that make this field unique in the art world). Therefore, choosing to focus on the aesthetic detritus of the studio could be quite fruitful for me, as it at once speaks of the art as art, it’s process, and is evidence of encounter, the reality of the artists work.

Additionally, when looking back through these images I am struck by the number of circular shapes (drawing pins, coffee mug stains) and just-off-circular/biomorphic shapes (squished bluetac, paint daubs), which is a continuation of the concerns of my research for this module. I can imagine these images would echo the shape of the Petri dishes in which they are mounted particularly well, creating concentric circles in 2D and 3D. By creating an aesthetically balanced composition between the image and the Petri dish, I give the microorganisms the opportunity to compliment or disrupt that composition. I will test some of the ‘objects’ (chairs, radiators) in Petri dishes to see how they look, because these are the kind of things I was initially imagining to use. However, my feeling now is I will move towards the more abstract, colourful and patterned, splashes and holes.