Experimental glass piece - Flatpacked
[Update: Well, it didn't get in. Still, it's great to have made something that I can take forward - already buzzing with ideas about where to go with this. I'm keen to develop the idea of the object and some of the thinking about and behind the object being integrated through a code]
The pink bit is just a background here - the main thing is a black and white wall-mounted piece. You can read the QR code on the screen, or on the object itself, and it takes you through to an exploration of space.
Flatpacked deals with space. It represents a 3D form or volume, but that’s actually an illusion. And then again, this non-space leads to the widest space of all – that which is inside our heads.
Read the QR code using a mobile QR reader (you’ve probably got one of these on your smartphone, and if not, you can easily download one) and it will take you to a poem, an exploration of space written out on the digital page (in black and white of course). I’ve given a starting point only, and the rest of the story is an act of the imagination – it’s up to each of us to interpret.
I’m interested in the way that confined spaces and the boundaries of objects can become a field for the imagination, as if the constraint inherent in the thing actually offers the means to explode its own boundaries.
In the same way, a theatre is just a wooden platform and some curtains, but we put a set and actors into it and say ’just imagine’ and this essentially contrived environment becomes a convincing place to express anger, joy, fear, laughter and a good story. Or children throw down a couple of hoodies into a field which become goal posts marking out the field of play as they spend hours being the latest football hero.
Often my work uses a framing device, or constraint, as a starting point for imagining how those boundaries might be escaped. Here I’ve pared it down, inspired by the black and white brief, to transform the monochrome two-dimensional piece into a wider and more expansive multi-dimensional space. As to the colour of the story in our heads, well, I can’t control that.
