Personal Project continued

My project in the Link Gallery exhibition!

The minimum amount of personal items I would choose to live with. (Under 100)

At the closing of the exhibition, people came up to eat the work so it would not become another one of my possessions.

A radical minimalist blog details a man's decision to live with only 100 or less personal items. I decided to make and inventory of all my possessions and then elininate the unnecessary until I was down to 100 items or less. I decided to represent this by making the work temporary, so I made miniature representations of my essential items out of the thinnest rice paper. I filmed myself eating them so that in the end I was not left with another possession. Having been invited to show my project at the Link Gallery I had to make another lot of rice paper possessions, which I displayed alongside the film of my eating them.
In reflection, I think I should have communicated better the concept behind the work; as a start changing the title from 'Less is More' to 'The 100 or less personal items I would choose to keep, having given away the rest'! It was a really good experience exhibiting work.

Personal Project

Less is More

This is the brainstorm of ideas for my personal project. I wanted to continue the idea of owning less and investigated the political side of this, with consumerism and anit-consumerist movements, nomadic tribes, philosophers etc but I kept on coming back to my own personal experience of this as that was what was really exciting to me.

12 Project continued

Continuous line drawing with bag

I was thinking about all the de-cluttering and shedding of possessions I had been doing in an effort to free up physical and mental time and space. Some radical minimalists pare down their possessions until they can fit everything into a rucksack or suitcase - they are really free to come and go as they please. The biggest possession I own is my house, the shell for my belongings. How free can I really be as long as I own this?

12 Project continued

The words in these photographs are often associated with undesirable emotions such as loneliness. With the words being placed with these images, this is accentuated. However, these images are one of positivity for me. The clutter in the corner of the room has gone and freed up a special space. The glass is empty because I have drunk the water and my thirst is quenched. To be with no-one/alone for me is often a luxury; time to lie-in and get much needed sleep or to sit with my own thoughts and in my own company. Alone is not the same as being lonely.

12 Project

A whole chest of drawers worth of clothes gone

Telly gone

A cellar full of junk gone

A vehicle gone

These four photos are of spaces emptied of various possessions. I made drawings of these for my series of 12 pieces, which I will photograph and add at a later date.

More Letters

Continuing on from the Stopping Time project and as part of the 12 Project, I installed the letters in the Holden Gallery and photographed them. I re-read the photos in the corner space, which prompted a desire to write back to my mother all these years later. The notepaper was an image of her letters spread out.

Stopping Time Project

I was interested in a theory that time really does speed up as people get older, which was backed up with mathematical equations. I used these as a basis to our experiments with paint. Having lots of ideas for this project I eventually focused my project on a bundle of letters I had unearthed during a de-cluttering of my belongings. The letters were written to me by my mother when I was at boarding school. She wrote hundreds of them. I had also photographed a corner of my room which was emptied in my 'de-cluttering' and was a great place to think and spend time. I re-built a scaled down corner of the room to house the stack of letters and created some images thinking about the emotional motivations of the letter writing.