Project Proposal - 'Observing the Unseen' (22/01/2014)

I came up with 'Observing the Unseen' as the main heading for the new project. This title alludes to the qualities and throw away nature of the material I am choosing to work with... I have set myself fishing wire as a material, and my aim is to experiment with it in many different ways to test its potential in sculpture.

Fishing wire not only has many visual, tangible and physical properties that are interesting to my mind, it also has established poetic connotations that I am excited to investigate and understand. I am drawn to fishing wire because of its changeable aesthetic qualities, the way light shines through it, and how it can sit orderly on the reel or be irreversibly tangled and chaotic. Its ability to go unnoticed was something I explored in the Sculpture brief, using it as a means to mystify the viewer and question how my cardboard sculpture was suspended. I am fascinated with the concept of fishing wire as a means of suspension, of imagination and of logic as much as of objects. Having visited museums and galleries where artworks, as well as museum exhibits, are displayed with the use of fishing wire, I feel compelled to analyse how suspending objects changes our perception of them and why we are prepared to consciously set aside logic in these instances.

I began to investigate the concept of the invisible, unnoticed or overlooked in my work last year, drawing attention to unnoticed spaces and the hidden histories of locations around Falmouth. I think the real essence of what I wish to convey and inspire in my art is for people to look a little more at the things around them, to investigate their surroundings, to notice and then to appreciate the details and subtleties of their everyday environment.

I listened to an interview in which one of my favourite artists, Tara Donovan, described her method of practice; she said she set herself a material and conducted experiments in an almost scientific way in order to understand its properties fully. I recognise that I do this to some extent in my work already, but it is my aim for this coming project to pay particular attention to this as a way of working. Paired with this rigorous exploration of the material inspired by Donovan, will be the application of Richard Serra's "Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself" (1967 - 1978), which will provide me with and existing set of instructions with which to investigate the fishing wire. I like the idea of using words as a formula to making as I use words a lot in my work to stimulate ideas and to recognise the connotations that will be evoked by a work (an object, a material, a colour...).