1.7 Displaying and Housing our Art

In the previous session we finished the day discussing all sorts of ways to protect our art work when we install it outside along the route. It was great to talk so practically as it really brought home to all of us the fact that this is a real, live project! Also, our list of practical measures quickly turned in to artistic inspiration too, with everyone thinking about not only how to protect and display the pieces but also how the viewer might interact with them. In today's session we decided that we'd pursue one particular idea of housing the art, namely boxes and in particular, taking bird boxes as our starting point.

We began the session by looking at selection of bird boxes images and some real life ones that I had made in the workshop. They showed how we could start with a traditional bird box and change it into something different depending on its practical and artistic intent. We looked through a lot of images and discussed how we could do something similar for our project to hold clay models or other things we might want to display. We discussed how the boxes them selves could become art works and that people could interact with them in lots of different ways. In pairs we made lists of potential types of locations that our boxes could be placed in and what sort of interactions people could have with them.

The lists became valuable records of our ideas to use in future sessions and many of them read like fantastic poems.

After these discussions we split into groups, with different people using different materials to start designing our own boxes, looking at pattern, colour and texture in particular. Everyone worked on paper to do this, with the (undecorated) example boxes and lots of our previous work on the tables to provide inspiration/references.

The resultant work provided loads of valuable ideas to take forward over the next few sessions. We ended the session looking through these and discussing how to translate some of the work into 3D. We discussed the practical time restrictions of the project and decided that in the next session we'd split into two groups - one working on the clay models which would go inside boxes, which the second group would start to decorate.