Tuesday, 8 March 2011

Conjuring an idea for my final piece...

For my final piece I wanted to do something that was out of my comfort zone, something that wasn't usual for me to do.
After a lot of thinking I decided that I wanted to do an installation, but what to do for it was an issue that I hadn't yet resolved. I knew that I wanted to link the theme of the installation to the different themes throughout my blog.
While looking through my blog I found the phrase 'old wives tale' in which caught my eye. From this I decided that I wanted to use this phrase somehow within my installation.

I came up with a few ideas from this topic:

1. The first idea I had was to use boards to create that feel of claustrophobia from the amount of 'old wives tales' that are circulated from word of mouth and how you can't escape them.
I was going to display this within a room where on the wall next to the door there would be big writing saying 'Mother knows best...' in that italic, neat way that a mother always writes and there would be flowers on the door and so from the outside of the room it would look really welcoming to show that its a 'mother' who tells their children these tales, the non-escaping tales, the person who loves you and who you love. However when going through the door there would be a really narrow passageway that's filled with portraits of mothers to add that daunting feeling to the 'never-ending' passage way as everyone knows that frustration of not knowing whether something is true or false.
When you finally reach the end of the claustrophobic passageway there would be a big whiteboard that would have a tally chart drawn on it with the headings 'true or false'. This would be for people to draw a small dash under the heading of what they believe 'old wives tales' to be.
From this you would enter a really light and airy room in which there will be a video of people saying what tales their mothers had told them when they were younger and them saying whether they believed it or not.
The light room would give you that feeling of freedom and space thus making that daunting almost claustrophobic feeling go away.
You would then go out of the room having felt different emotions from the same topic and almost feel relieved and hopefully have actually learnt and liked your experience.

Even though I really wanted to continue with this idea I felt that it wouldn't be practical within the space available and it would also be quite a daunting task to complete within 8 hours.

2. My second idea, inspired by my first one, was to still have the boards, but only two of them in which would be set at a 90 degree angle. I would have a shelf on the second board which would situate a television playing my video as well as a photo frame with a portrait of a mother.
On the first board I would have a child's bed coming out of it with the usual teddy bear laying on the bed with a chair next to the bed on the floor. This would represent a mother telling her child an 'old wives tale'.

Even though this was quite a good idea, I thought that it didn't really represent the telling of 'old wives tales' that well as I feel that this installation would be better suited with nursery rhymes. I also figured out that I wouldn't be able to get a bed and I don't know if the board and shelf would actually support and hold up the television safely.

I told myself that I had to be much more practical if I was actually going to succeed with my ideal installation.

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