Last week I was away at interviews in Plymouth and Falmouth so I had a limited number of research that I would be able to do in terms of making so instead I decided to do some reading, writing and collecting of objects. Here is what I discovered on my trip:
So far I have read the books that Pip gave me to look at and have found out a number of interesting opinions and facts which have been influential for the next step to my project. Whilst reading the book “Home made- contemporary Russian folk artifacts”, I descovered that people living in Russia, who were experiencing the collapse of the soviet Union, could not buy anything in the stores because there was nothing for sale and as a result had to make do wih their own handmade tools and objects. Vlandimir Arkhipov set out on a mission to collect these objects and record them in this book. He started out by asking people he knew such as friends and family but as people heard about the book more and more people and their objects started to find him. He quotes in his book that all the objects he recorded have three characteristics in common “functionality, a visual uniqueness and the testimony of the author, who is both the creator and the user”.A lot of the obejects he discovered were unrecogniseable to me but looking through the book I found it interesting to see if I could guess what the objects were before reading about them. I found that I was often able to tell what the different parts of the objects were originally but not necesarilly what it was used for. What I also liked about the book is how everything to the person who made it, their name and age, a photo of the obejct, and even a monolgue has been dicumented which I think links well to the questionnaires I did at the beggining of my project.
Some of my favourite objects form the book included a ‘Home for a Queen Bee’ consisting of a boy’s Grandma’s hair curlers, an elatic band and two bottle tops. At first I thought the object was much bigger than its actual size because I couldnt tell what it was made from but as soon as i spotted the bottle top I could scale up the rest of the objects. I think the hair curlers are also very interesting aesthetically because when I fisrt saw them I thought they were made of rubber but then the text explains they are actually made of plastic. I also like how the objects use and importance is very specific (looking after the queen bee temporarily whilst bees are tranfered to a new hive) which to me makes the object more valuable than one which has a genral use such as a hammer or another kind of tool.
I also like the ‘Berry picker’ because i think its delicate and small narure suits it’s function of priking hols in berries before making jam. I like how simple its construction is, consisting of a plastic bottle top and 4 pins which meet at a point in the centre. Like the ‘Home for a Queen Bee’ its use is again very particular and the fact that its use is so hard to guess makes it more interesting.
The second book I looked at was “Inspiratioanal Objects”, a visual collection of “simple, elegant forms” by Alison Milner. A fact that I found interesting in the book was that “the American product designer Karim Rashid recently estimated that we each interact with 520 objects a day, the majority of which we take for granted and barely even notice”. I also found it interesting to see how she had chategorised each object depending on whether it was a liquid, wire, malleable, solid, sheet or natural object. the criteria she looked at was what the object was made from, what it’s original state was, and the processes determining it’s new form. I like how the aim of the book is slightly phycological in the way that each object is placed carefully next to other objects on the page in order to make the viewer question why they are placed that way. It’s all to do with how familiar the viewer is with each object, how the viewers contrast or look for similarities between the obejcts, and their own personal attatchment or memories with certain objects. The fact that all the objects ar photographed in black and white makes these comparisons and the ability to question the order of the objects easier. I think that colour is a completely separate component of an object to the form or texture of an object which is what the main focus is in the book. By using colour it would have distracted the viewer from these components which is somthing I might want to concider when involving people in further research.
Today I started to collect found items form the beach at Falmouth. In response to the book “Home made” I decided to try and make my own objects out of things that I found in the environment that surrounded me. Seeing as I was in an unfamiliar place whilst doing this I thought it might help me stumble across more unfamiliar objects. The items I collected were bits of worn wood, coloured rope, polystyrene parts, string, sea weed, pebbles, half a dog toy, tenis ball strip etc.I tried to collect items that were a mix of man made and natural items to create a contrast of textures when combining them to make new objects.
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