On Friday, we had a writing workshop which was geared towards one of the ADAS writing objectives for the Artifact project: 300 words of preparatory research for a short video we were to make talking about an object.

For the purposes of the Friday exercise, we were told to bring in a real object and a picture of an object, and I chose to bring in my linocut stamp of my elephant Dacre Beast.

Then, we did a series of exercises to widen our ability to talk about the object.

The first was about the found object, and writing about it objectively for 5 minutes. I found this a bit easier to write because I had created the object myself, so I knew a bit about its origins and purpose.

Then, where the second line is on the middle picture below, we had to do a similar writing activity, but this time, we were posed with the task of writing thoughts and feelings about the object. This was significantly more fun.

After we looked at these objects, we were tasked to dig into our memories and think of an object from our childhood, or something that was very much not present in the room, and immediately the object that came to mind was a little, rubber Ariel figurine that I had as a kid when I was about 7 or 8.

This was the exercise that got me the most emotionally involved. It was a bit like going back to a dream and being in you 7 year old body where all of the stakes were exactly the same, and then sort of re-entering your current body and realizing that none of it mattered and that you have no idea where that object is in the world. It was strange though that the object itself offered such direct access to these memories and stakes, because perhaps what was more interesting than the object itself was our personal relation to it or reason for remembering it. Objects are tied to people. That is what makes them most interesting to me. Caio was my partner for this project and he had a similar experience, but he was more transfixed by the lost nature of his remembered object, which also happened to be a toy, than his memories with it.

Lastly, things got very silly, and we gave voices to new objects and created dialogues between these objects in those voices.

Caio and I worked with two objects which we affectionately called Glove and Whale. The impression that we got was that they were two dudes that lived in a basement flat together and smoked a lot of weed in their spare time. Glove was a bit of a prick, and whale was just a really cool, easy going dude, but they would never question the dynamics of their friendship. Whale had a low, slow surfer bro voice, and Glove was a bit more annoying. Together, we created a dialogue between the two about public transit.

Overall the exercises were very helpful in reimagining ways that we could talk about objects, and it helped to prepare for writing about the object in preparation for the video.

On Tuesday, I had an academic tutorial with Matt about all of the objects I had been drawn to in my visits to the V&A and to the Cutty Sark. Going into the tutorial, I had some idea of the objects I was particularly excited about, but in talking through my exploration, I realized that I was really drawn to these carved wooden iconographic figures, particularly the Dacre Beasts from the V&A and the collection of ship figureheads at the Cutty Sark. I had also picked up on some carved figureheads for puppet caricatures of politicians at the V&A, and this made me realize that the carving did something interesting to the grotesque nature of these animated objects.

I had done the most research into the Dacre Beasts in particular because, according to an article in the Guardian, they were inspiration for some of Tenniel’s illustrated beasts in Alice and Wonderland.

Looking at the illustrations of Alice and Wonderland ignited a curiosity of the political nature of the beast and allegory. How does two dimensional caricature and creation of fantastic beast better illustrate ideas or simplifications of people or ideology? There are embedded notions of political socialization in the way that we create monsters for children’s stories. There is a violence embedded in the term, but it also has noble/positive connotations. Regardless, there is a masculinity to it, which I found interesting and in stark contrast to the figurehead of ships, which tend to be female, or at least represent a ship, which is usually female.

In talking to Matt, he brought a couple of different elements to light about the nature of folklore and the cultural perspective that I bring to the term beast. Different folklore traditions have different uses of the beast and different iconography for positive and negative symbolism, so researching deeper into different folklore traditions will be important as well as keeping in mind which stories I have a foothold in telling. It is important to consider power relations here as well as stolen stories.

There is also a religious iconography to the nature of the mythological and characterized beast, with the devil, superstition, and belief in the saints. I am interested in employing this idea of beast mythology and iconography to the modern day discourse of politicians as beasts.

Matt directed me to look up Paul McCarthy, who created an exhibition of wooden ‘Spinoffs’, which are reinterpreted, giant wooden statues of conglomerations of Disney characters into new sorts of ‘monsters‘ to make a comment on the movie industry and the ‘commodification of culture,’ according to Donatien Grau on McCarthy’s show with Hauser and Wirth in LA.

Additionally, the Chapman Brothers are interested in a similar field using sculpture, installation and illustrative means. I am interested in taking these back into the narrative of American Politics. I have started quite basic in my sketches, but I think there is something to this iconography.

On Monday, we had a materials exploration with Annie and Anna, which was exciting because I have been thinking about different places where my illustrated images can live. I am really interested in where images can go and creating spaces with them as well as incorporating different textures into them.

I am particularly interested in weaving and using living hinges to create multiple different paths and ways that one can interpret a in image or series of images, but this is only a half baked idea at the moment.

We also talked about using bioplastics, and I am interested in the idea of bringing back the original idea that I did in the first project of creating layers of clear acrylic to tell cross sections of a story, but with using bioplastics. The idea of creating illustrations in 3-D space that will decompose is interesting to me in relation to the way that icons dissapear and change.

On the first Friday of the Artifact project, we did a really interesting activity in which we were told to bring in some objects and put them on the tables in our base rooms. We had a discussion of a group of artists in New York who collected objects and works of people from their own neighborhoods, and put the objects that their neighbors had deemed important in a gallery. We were told to break apart to select objects to make a mini museum.

I chose objects somewhat randomly. The curation piece was somewhat two-fold, as the initial selection had been made by whoever brought the object in, and it was up to our groups to elevate them and create a dialogue amongst them in relation to the other objects in our group.

We didn’t really know anything about our objects except for what we had in front of us. It reminded me a little of the conversation that we had had with Clare in our debriefing about the museum the previous day, which was that you ‘get’ what you come in with. So we had some knowledge, but it was limited. Thus, we experimented with as many relationships as we could create.

We tried putting all of our objects in one long connecting line, where contours met.

We tried organizing by warmth or coolness of colors.

We attempted to organize by what we thought might be made in the East vs. the West (though our assigning this was somewhat problematic).

Physically, we also attempted to organize according to age and size, but there was an emerging line between categorizing according to physical characteristics vs. story. Eventually, we ended up drawing from an improv game, which was a story creation. What we would do was pick an object, and one by one place them, say a sentence, and continue the story. So, for example, I picked up the bottle, placed it in the story space, and said, “There once was a prince who lived in a glass house,” and then someone would be left to pick another object to start off in a way to continue the story.

We ended up having the most fun with this because it allowed us to reimagine the objects in the most ways, and it threw away the notion of a crystallized interpretation of an object. Here they were all just starting points which could relate to any object in any other object through literally any interpretation.

The stories we told together ranged all over the place, from romcoms to Sci-Fi action stories. Regardless, they made us laugh a lot and engage with the objects in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Perhaps this reinterpretation was a bit irreverent towards the intended purpose of the objects, but the value of making stories and encouraging interactivity was more important to us for the purpose of this exercise.

We decided to call the museum the TheirStory museum, to reinterpret the crystalized notion of an object’s history and give it to ‘them,’ meaning whoever came to our museum. In order to provide some structure and a gameification of the exercise, we wrote down a bunch of different genres and put them in a hat so that people could come in, draw a genre, and have an idea of where to start in their object based storytelling. Some people were a bit timid to get involved at first, but the museum staff ended up participating a fair amount to facilitate some of the storytelling. It was very silly, but it was delightful to find so many permutations of storytelling and collaboration in the arrangement of the objects.

Additionally, we got to go around an explore different museums curated by our peers. This was incredibly exciting because so many people took vastly different approaches. Some people used the floor or created walls. Others strung objects from the ceiling or walked you through a story of an individual. One museum had pop ups paper silhouettes where you had to guess what objects were.

Overall it was an amazing activity, and it was incredible to see all of the diverse approaches to organizing and reinterpreting objects in relation to one another.

On Wednesday, after my trip to the Cutty Sark, I returned to the V&A in order to see if the rapid response room had opened. However, upon arrival it was still closed, so I decided to roam the parts of the museum that I did not get to on my previous visit.

This time, I was more interested in ‘packaging’ in a sense.

I was drawn to these biscuit tins because they have a life beyond their first intended use. A lot of them are shaped to look like different objects, so the biscuits inside are only the temporary inhabitants. I liked, too that many of the biscuit containers had illustration/interactive elements that were clearly geared to market to children.

I also was drawn to these clocks for a similar reason. They have ornamentation/a type of packaging that tells a story in its structure by creating a little stage.

These locks were fascinating to me because their excessive complexity also demands a story. They are surprising in their structure and mechanism, and I also just found them to be quite beautiful.

These last bits and bobs were just oddities and things that I found to be beautiful. Most of the objects that I was drawn to in these visits were largely decorative or highly specific in their function. However, I am interested in how this specificity creates a narrative or a series of narratives that can be projected upon them.

On Monday, the third project Artifact was launched. It is the first project that we will be completing on our own, which is both exciting and terrifying.

During the brief, we looked at a number of examples of how different pathways approached this sort of prompt, or reinterpreted objects. I was really excited about the narrative surrounding the new branding of the Globe Theater.

I loved that they took a cross section of the physical object that they were examining, the timber that holds the Globe together, and made it into an object that could be transmitted. They essentially created and modified a fingerprint of the building. However, they didn’t just use the wood, they carved into it to put a simple birds eye of the plan into it, (the carved ring). So, the object is an impression of both the part and the whole.

After looking at some examples of artifacts, we did a drawing exercise by which we combined elements of different objects to reimagine new ones and new compositions. In a way, it reminded me of blind contour, which I had been exploring in my previous project.

For me, these drawings have a secret code to them. I know the reference objects and the components that I chose to highlight in the drawings, but I probably will forget in some time. Together, they create an abstract form of that total experience.