Click here for an overview of Day 6. Shadow CubeExperimenting with the virtual and the real. Shadows and reflections and their relation to the object. You tube video link Shadow cube video. SK TH: Locksbrook Campus proved to be a bit busier today, with the permitted return of all undergraduates in addition to last week's final year students. At one point, the gallery approached its maximum Covid-capacity, i.e. eight. So not crowded. LB: Today was a day of visitors and spontaneous performance! It was great to have some real people in the real space, talking about real art. We had a visit from a group of MA Fine Art peers and were able to talk about what we're doing, face to face. Plenty of thought provoking conversations. One such visitor was George Thom who viewed the gallery through a VR headset, to explore ideas of the virtual vs. the real, as part of his research. Harry Coucher, another of the current MA Fine Art cohort, began to spontaneously interact with my hanging knitting installation. Click here for part of this impromptu performance. It was so good to see someone else respond to my work in a physical space! After some conversation, we agreed that he would perform again, this time wearing Body cocoon 3, which is knitted with the same red wool. Touching textiles seems to be irresistible to many people. Usually, in a gallery, there are signs saying 'Do not touch' , but people often touch my work regardless. In pre-Covid times I would actively invite people to touch or, indeed sometimes, to wear my soft sculptures. Sadly, as a result of the very real and ubiquitous contamination anxiety due to the pandemic I haven't been able to allow other people to interact with my work in this way for the past year. As it happened, no one had touched the hanging installation for several days and the Body cocoon was in a bag, also untouched. After thinking it all through, we decided it was safe to go ahead. During the resulting performance the installation came alive; Harry said that he felt that he 'became part of the environment'. The subsequent conversation ranged from Deleuze's plane, 'insideness and outsidedness' to Freud's Uncanny, Kristeva's abjection, Csikszentmihalyi's 'state of flow' and Douglas' 'matter out of place'. Click here for a video of some excerpts of the performance. After the performance, there were clear marks of Harry's actions in the tangled strands of unravelling yarn. The presence of absence?
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Who we are:LB: Lou Baker |