Week Five: Palimpsest

Posted bygeorgiacgspatialdesignPosted inDesign Practice ITags:

Starting the process of refining my work in relation to artists and designers that are already designing in the field that i am interested in. Writing about the journey: mapping a new direction – where to from here?

Develop work in conversation with one or more readings/works of other artists/designers: Part bibliography

Adding layers of connections of understanding and communicating ideas

over the course of the last week i have been creating and experimenting with different materials and their exposure to nature and how they start to fall apart over time. Like the physical properties of a house that you life in. so, even though the house around you may age and become damaged and need to be fixed this can also relate to the deeper feelings and connections that go on inside the metaphorical home too. As you grow through life you and your family may grow apart, become interested in different things, argue over who is right and who is wrong, the walls and boundaries that have always kept you close begin to fade. You are now exploring the wide world by yourself, making decisions and planning your life on your own. however, even though you have left the bubble of your physical home, the values and attributes that you have been raised around and brought up with will stay with you forever. Home is now within you and you take it everywhere that you choose to go. So, even though the material may fall away and decay into dust the memories and the support this has given you will stay with you forever.

Material decay over 6 days

Planning for final presentation in week 6 – written work

  • Create a holistic statement for sharing your thoughts on what you have developed over the past few weeks.
    • A holistic statement is “for any whole that was formed for a specific purpose, a statement of purpose is the starting point of your holistic context.”
    • Exploring the senses of the human body through the lens of the body as a threshold. Mapping and documenting how I experience home through my own interactions of see, hear, touch, smell, and even taste. By taking a very tacit way of working and thinking and put this into words to explain the processes and decisions that I make as I work through my methods which is a very foreign concept to me as my way of doing and making I have never really been able to put into words. Challenging my thinking and making through the use of new methods such as video media and experimental surface and material exploration has allowed my thinking to take on a more metaphorical approach. Instead of isolating the components of a home through traditional means by creating walls and a roof to create shelter I started to think about the home as a metaphorical being, a feeling that we don’t live in but rather it lives in us.
  • The holistic statement needs to address your generative process, beginning with the selection of your 5 words.
    • Call, boundary, decay, stain, trace
    • The texture of a surface calls for you to crossover a boundary of fear to reach out and touch it. Fingers tracing over the ridges and hollows as the material starts to decay under your touch, lifting your hand to reveal a stain of the material residue still lingering on your fingers… from word to making Design Practice has taken me on an exciting journey from instability and uncertainty of not knowing what I was doing or making through to trusting the process and into a shift in my proposed research area. It is through these 5 matrix words of Call, Boundary, Decay, Trace, and Stain that I was able to make this shift. From thinking about designing a transportable home for a nomadic person that can be disassembled and reassembled with the nomad as they travel around. To what home really means from an autoethnographical point of view, how this essence of home for a white middle class person can be mapped and explored through the senses of see, touch, hear, smell, and even possibly taste.
  • Include a quote or reference to at least one text relevant to your exploration.
    • “the senses are unique in every person” meaning that every sense is seen, felt, and experienced differently by every single person. as the saying goes, no two people see the same rainbow… and no two people experience that same feelings either through texture touch through to fragmented smells. As our fingerprints are unique to us the way we experience this world is unique and different to everyone
    • “the senses move us through space” it is also from this essay that I was drawn to this quote. The senses move us through space. From the busy streets of the city, cigarette smoke, vehicle engine fumes, loud chatter and laughter, horns honking, and concrete for miles. Where the smells, sounds, and even the sights remind you of how small a piece you are in the ever-growing world around us
    • “senses trigger and amplify other senses” From the perspective that all of your senses work together to create the world around you, you see a flower blooming which makes your nose want to sniff it. As does walking in the door to home again after being away for a period of time, taking a deep breath in and breathing out and feeling the familiar consume and wash over you again.
    • Mark Wigley – The Architecture of Atmosphere
      • “atmosphere seems to start precisely where the construction stops” senses can also be looked at as ways of creating atmosphere. Through different visible, physical, smells, and constructions and different human interactions with the constructed spaces different atmospheres are created. Whether it is from an intimate home environment, to a public city environment, to a professional work environment these different atmospheres are created through the activities that occur in the spaces that we construct.
      • “to construct a building is to construct an atmosphere”
        • Quoting Frank Lloyd Wright
        • “the sum total of “house” and all the things in it with which we try to satisfy the requirements of utility and our craving for the beautiful is atmosphere, good or bad, that children breathe as surely as the plain air”
    • Naming house and home: word origins
      • “the soothing sound of heavy drops hitting against the roof and windows”- expresses both languages of house and home through house as the physicalconstruction sheltering the person from getting wet, and home being the comfort the person received from the fact that the water will not get to them
      • House- to hide- both terms imply shelter/to hide
      • Home- “hide” like animal skin- animals are at home in their skin- humans have developed places that go beyond shelter- these are home
  • Limited to 400 – 500 words.
  • This is a written statement 
  • Follow the written statement with a visual map of the journey of your ideas undertaken over the past 5 weeks, this can be a travel diary – a methods discussion – image/text exploration, concept sketch, it needs to be a concise record that traces the progress of your explorations.
  • Include failures and discuss what you learned, failure is always part of the journey… 
    • Thing that I have found increasingly difficult when trying to progress through this paper is trying to create something physical and make something that holds and expresses the entirety of my thinking. As my research took on a different turn from creating a structure that can act as a shelter and be transported from place to place, into a research area that is centred a lot around my experiences of home and how my bodily senses are how I experience home as a feeling rather than the architecture that surrounds me. I started to generate work that was texture based instead of structure based. Works and videos that are more of a recording process instead of a generating and resolving of works. I tried to record how other members of my family experience home but this was not possible in this short period of time due to the floor plan of my house and property being lost by the previous owner and the council unable to find it. I would like to create my own rough floor plan of my house and get my family to mark down their experiences of where they spend the most time, where they would like to spend their time instead, what they would change, do the different seasons change where they spend their time, and most importantly what is their most walked track around the house/most recent. This would help me to gage a better understanding of what my home means to the other people I share it with.
  • Outline the future… where to from here?

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