Showtime!

Still from one of the films made for my MA.

Finishing off and reflecting

Next week I shall be putting up my MA show. It is held in the Architecture building of UCA Canterbury, a surprisingly uninspiring space for any learning or presentation.

In the meantime I have to finish all the presentation materials that I hope to display, last week I handed in the last piece of written work that was required for the course. The Critical paper was fairly short, in words, but had to be concise and reflect on my final project which took a lot of photographs, drawings and film, so it became a fairly lengthy document.

To date there are four films that are on my Youtube Channel ‘Trace and Traversal’. Sharing the films on Youtube was the best way to publicly ‘air’ them. I hope to have two of these films running at my show. ‘The Summer Solstice full-moon walk on the Salt Way’ film has been edited by Erin Lauren-Hayhow and I find it beautifully mesmerising. This will hopefully be run on a loop, it has background sound but that is ok to hear as low noise in the display area. Watch the film here.

Second still from a moving film...

The other film explaining about the Storywalk concept has a narration by Chris Jelley and I hope to have some earphones ready for people to ‘plug in’ to the film if they wish.

Watch his introduction to Storywalks here.

  

Last night I worked on the profile of the walk. It is a foam-board cut out representation of the topography, which will show the length of the path to scale showing the undulations of the landscape. This is unlike a geological cross-section, which would possibly run across the area along a set grid reference. My profile is constructed from using a website that enables me to pin-point locations on a map and obtain the longitude, latitude and heights above sea level. It has been very useful for plotting the route using many historic references to the Salt Way. The website is http://gridreferencefinder.com

Photographs of the smallest three scaled models

I have nearly finished three small-scaled studio models that are to be on display. These are a set, which represent the site-specific way-markers that I have designed for the Salt Way which tell the story of Salt-making in their construction. The models construction needed to be thought upon, I refer to this in an earlier blog, but I finally worked out a method and I think they look quite beautiful. I have always admired the work of Rachel Whiteread and during my research I have further researched and referred to her work.

Here is a link to an article on her 

Next is an except from my critical paper that explains the process of making the models.

‘I cast the models in the natural environment, firstly creating a negative of the form that I wanted, putting a square mould around it and filling with plaster of paris, creating a square imprinted form that when extracted also left a trace of its existence as a curious feature on the ground. I had initially planned to make the models in another way but experimenting with the process itself encouraged me to explore the idea of imprinting my models using a negative form instead, staying honest to the ideas of my project has highlighted on the importance of trace in the environment.’

My project has been about finding meaning in the landscape, looking at how I could create a design strategy to connect people to an unfamiliar place by their interaction with it in a variety of ways. I looked in depth at traces left in the landscape and our traversal through it.

This hopefully explains why I am contemplating calling my show and related publication (yet to be completed!) ‘Trace and Traversal.’

There is tonight and another full day left to finish that and many other pieces of work ready to display the following week. Wish me luck!