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Created for the cultural olympiad in 2012, the Boat Project by artist duo Lone Twin was built collectively by people from the south-east of England. Each piece of the boat is made from donated wooden objects, the only criteria for donation being that they had to have a story behind them. The artists created it after thinking about the way boats open up the world to exploration and cultural exchange.

What’s important about this for me is the transformation of objects. They’re still mostly recognisable individually, but when viewed all together they have been made into something greater than themselves. The boat is a functional sea-faring boat, whilst also being an archive of valued items. It’s something you walk through and around, engulfing you in the stories of other people.

I think this is something that I should consider when making my own reconstructions, the objects are definitely transformed – but that transformation should tell us something about the object itself, from both the perspective of the future archaeologist and current viewers.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/may/01/lone-twin-boat-project

http://theboatproject.com/

http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/programme/the-boat-project

Info about resin casting (pouring sprues and air holes particularly useful): https://medium.com/jaycon-systems/the-complete-guide-to-diy-molding-resin-casting-4921301873ad

“Nelson makes large-scale sculptural installations, which immerse the viewer in an unfolding narrative that develops through a sequence of meticulously realised spatial structures. The weaving of fact and fiction has always been fundamental to Nelson’s practice and his constructs are steeped in both literary and cinematic references whilst drawing upon the geography, history and cultural context of their location.” – The British Council

His work The Asset Strippers, a commission for Tate Britain explores the dying breaths of British industry. It consists of a series of sculptures made from discarded machinery and industrial debris. According to the Tate: “it presents us with a vision of artefacts cannibalised from the last days of the industrial era in place of the treasures of empire that would normally adorn such halls.” By filling the halls with these artefacts of a fast-retreating age, he positions the galleries as ornate storage facilities in which things are placed to be forgotten.

This is a fascinating aspect of the work for me. He’s created these sculptures that look like ready-mades, as if they’re pre-existing machines that he’s just displayed. But in fact their amalgamations of different industrial relics, which you can see in the photo above – what looks to be a seed planter has been carefully on top of steel girders and building materials. It’s this sense of something looking authentic until you pay close attention that I want to achieve with my casts. I want them to seem familiar and almost recognisable, but alien enough for the viewer to reflect on their own assumptions and to question their world view.

To the left is Nelson’s installation ‘The Black Art Barbecue’. It recreates an artists desk and draws influences from shrines and totemic objects. Drawing parallels between mythology and the myth of the artist. The use of place to create narrative is really relevant to my work this term, it’s something I’ll need to think carefully about when setting up my installation. Every object in Nelson’s piece adds to his narrative and to the character of the absent artist, which is what needs to happen in my own set-up.

http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/nelson-mike-1967

http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/nelson-mike-1967/object/the-black-art-barbecue-san-antonio-august-1961-nelson-1998-p7529

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/18/mike-nelson-interview-tate-britain-asset-strippers-cement-mixer

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/mike-nelson

I realised after setting up my installation that the video hadn’t exported properly, so I’ve re-exported with the data that wasn’t included the first time and uploaded it here.

Had a play around with photos I’ve taken of the River Lune estuary and my installation. Tried to imagine what the archaeologist’s camp might look like, what tools she might use and how she might store things. I also thought about the future environment, a sky clouded with pollution, the marsh filled with artefacts.

What would she make of this space? Is the marsh filled with waste or are the objects a continuation of the traditions linking water and offerings?

A couple of weeks ago I walked down to the River Conder to gather artefacts and take some video.

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The trigger cameras I used ended up creating really interesting distortions in the footage, which I like a lot. It definitely adds a degree of separation and alien-ness to the images and makes them feel quite authentic.

I found some good objects to play around with and imagine as future artefacts, searching the river banks meant that they’ve already aged and transformed to some extent.

“In Saving The World, Gob Squad squeeze the world into a handful of videotapes. Produced in 24 hours, a seven camera panoramic film portrays one place of a city as a microcosm of the entire world. The mission is nothing less than to save the planet and preserve it for an unknown future. Starting with ‘saving’ sunrise, Gob Squad soon move on to ‘saving’ the essentials of life on earth such as money, freedom, ice cream and love.” http://www.gobsquad.com/projects/saving-the-world

The theatre/performance group Gob Squad was recommended to me during my pop-up exhibition. I found this particular piece interesting because it’s the other end of my idea’s stick. I’m approaching the exploration of what will survive from today from the perspective of people in the future, whereas Gob Squad have made an artefact which tries to preserve today’s world for the future. They’ve done so by closely documenting and interacting with a fragment of the larger world, it’s interesting to think about how this might be interpreted if it survives and how people might gain understanding from it. Things like Turkish culture being friendliness and the public library as a place that contains all knowledge are really cool nuggets of primary source information, which people could take as fact or interpret in all sorts of different ways. Perhaps if I try to reverse engineer the meaning of my artefacts by taking their current use and abstracting it, or when I don’t know what they are by imagining what they could be, I could come up with some similar nugget-type pieces of information that are used to paint a larger picture of the world.

I walked out to the River Lune today so I could find artefacts, make casts and do some sound recording and filming.

Things didn’t go as planned for a few reasons: the weather wasn’t great, it was wet and cold which meant that the plaster wouldn’t be able to set properly and that sound recordings would be tricky due to wind, rain etc. Also, the place that Dom directed to me to turned out to be a conservation area for ground-nesting birds – so I wasn’t confident walking too far from the path and was also concerned about what effects plaster might have.

Because of all this, I’ve only been able to get photographs and gather a few objects. I think this is an okay start, I can experiment with casting, drawing and photographing them and see where that takes me; the photographs could also be good for digital collages so I’ll play with that too.

I’m thinking that it might be worth planning a whole day in Morecambe on the beaches, Dom said that Half Moon Bay is a good spot. Maybe there’ll be more large debris and things that I can use my measuring sticks with as well as make good on-site casts of.

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Mark Leckey’s work revolves around the advancement of technology and its impact on culture. Particularly the transition from analogue to digital equipment. He’s worked across a wide range of mediums, including video and performance. He often explores the relationship between ourselves and a wider collective consciousness, examining obscure aspects of British culture such as Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) a film about trace dance in nightclubs from the 70s-90s. Another film of his Dream English Kid (2015) explores the connection between our memories and the internet; he recreates memories from his childhood using imagery he’s found online. This came about after he found a video of the concert he attended as a child.

To me it seems that Leckey’s work explores the folk art of the late 20th and 21st century, his use of found things both physical and digital and the way he curates them makes them feel to me like a contemporary cabinet of curiosity. A snapshot into the mundane yet extraordinary lives we have today.

“The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things explores the tenuous boundaries between the virtual and real worlds. As modern technology becomes ever more sophisticated and pervasive, objects communicate with us: phones talk back, refrigerators suggest recipes and websites anticipate our desires. This exhibition explores the concept of techno-atavism, whereby advanced technology returns us to the beliefs of our ancestral past. Through a conceptual assemblage of archaeological artefacts, contemporary artworks and visionary machines, Mark Leckey creates a network of objects – communicating, talking to one another and, implicitly, looking back at us.” — Aesthetica Magazine

The idea that advances in technology and the effect that has on the world returns us to more ancient belief systems is very relevant to my practice. I think that allowing more technology to enter my future could be helpful in world-building and also I need to stop seeing it as some untouchable realm, we’ll be there pretty soon given the rate at which the climate is changing

Sources: http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/mark-leckey-the-universal-addressability-of-dumb-things-at-nottingham-contemporary/ https://frieze.com/article/universal-addressability-dumb-things https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leckey-dream-english-kid-1964-1999-ad-t14666 https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/mark-leckey-see-we-assemble https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1672?

I’m interested in the way Dion uses collection as artwork and his construction of imagined scientific spaces. This is definitely something to consider as I build my archaeologist’s research and documentation, perhaps their workspace too as a way to present my work for assessment.

I don’t think I want the archaeologist to be a known character as such; someone with a name, body and personality, but more of an anonymous gatherer of material and knowledge – certainly not someone remembered in history. Instead, I want to focus on their finds and theories – using their suppositions about the artefacts they find to reveal cultural information about their own time. To do this I can use their artefact drawings, reconstructions, notes, restoration of objects etc. combined with film and audio work.

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Left: The Great Munich Bug Hunt, 1983 https://art21.org/read/mark-dion-science-and-aesthetics/                      

Middle: Department of Marine Animal Identification of the City of San Francisco (Chinatown Division), 1998/2010 http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/mark-dion/series-sculpture-and-installation/36

Right: The Cabinet of the Machines of Capital, 2012 https://universes.art/en/montevideo-biennial/2012/photo-tour/16-mark-dion/

“Something very familiar suddenly becomes kind of extraordinary when it gains the status of being a specimen” — I think this and the act of collection are what I find important about this video and work in relation to my idea. A bit like ready-mades, when you take something mundane and begin to examine it it takes on a new life and meaning. This came up when I did the performance, that questioning what marks we leave behind and how they’ll be interpreted enables us to step back and critically reflect on the world around us.

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Left: Rescue Archaeology, A Project for The Museum of Modern Art, 2005 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/120

Right: Tate Thames Dig, 1999 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dion-tate-thames-dig-t07669

Other Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezzYYo9T5-c https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mark-dion-2789 https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/mark-dion-misadventures-21st-century-naturalist