I've been thinking about my exhibition.. We have an exhibition to put on at the end of the project, though it is in the studio I need to figure out a way pf showing my work clearly so people can understand what I have achieved. 
    Because I have been mapping the places of my swaps I obviously have a giant map, I was thinking of something like a police board...? I attempted to find an image but you will have to use your imagination; imagine csi for example when there in the board room putting all the clues and suspects togethor, right? well they stick all there information onto a giant board and draw lines of attachment between people and places etc. Hopefully you understand I wouldn't blame you if you didnt though :) I will upload a sketch or somehting hopefully that WILL work.




It was just a quick one btw :)

TUTORIAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes they can be helpful :D

I had a tutorial with Mr Kit Craig, we spoke about my experiments talked about Gillian Wearing, and also spoke about the other ideas I had. One of them being If I were to, like Gonzalez-Torres, have maybe a bowl/ container of individual sweets I would set them up so people would just take them slowly disintegrating the piece....but then what ? Is what he asked me.








I don't know.....




After that we chatted about how I could take that idea further and together we discussed the idea of a POP-UP shop, where instead of me just straight up giving things away I would trade or swap for items from the public. Originally the idea was that I would set up a sweet shop in my studio space, but in my opinion no one is ever in the studio so I took it upstairs into the Holden Café. 

I set up my shop from 11am till 1pm bought several big bags of sweets and played shop :). 



The response was slow, it felt as if I was intimidating people to much so they wouldn't come close enough to know what was going on. Eventually people started to play along, instead of sitting and waiting I began taking my goods to other people and explain my situation as often as possible. Once people realised I wasn't there to poison them or anything they were much happier to participate. I had an amazing response and managed to trade around 50 items :)
 There are photographs of each and every item and a logbook of the trades but for some reason I cannot upload images from my computer :(.


These items are very very very important, they are the backbone of my work at this moment in time. For every item recieve I will create a piece of work around it. 


My idea is that I will take these items and trade them around the city of Manchester as much as I can, some items will be untradeable for example the reciepts and train tickets I don't believe I will get anywhere with them so I will create something out of them :).

Ideas 1-3.

I was hit by inspiration during our first meeting and instantly went off and did something. I'm interested in what people have to say, what they hold dear etc. I made a crude "suggestion" box which I adorned with "How are you feeling today?" and left it in a public area with pencil and paper for people to reply.
    After a week I received an adequate amount of responses, some were quite upsetting stating that they "hated themselves," or "they weren't happy because..." alongside these there were also a lot where people had just taken the piss. Although I feel optimistic about my bodge job piece I really can't think how I can take it any further, what can I actually do with what people have said? Other than the obvious Gilian Wearing style photos.

2. Alongside a fellow student I went around the woods where I live and painted trees :) We decided to do this after my friend wallpapered the subway near her house, in doing this we "disrupted" our setting by painting white bands around trees within close proximity of each other.

Obviously this is not what my friend and I achieved, although it was the intention when we set out to do. Our intervention of the environment was a littler subtler, we painted white stripes which were 5" wide around the trunks of trees. Due to the nature of this we were forced to do it in the dark, which in turn meant that all the photos turned out shit.


3.My third experiment relates back to my first, I am interested in what people have to say. I decided to cover tables in a café with paper and invited the customers to draw/doodle/wright etc. Unfortunately the paper I put down was taken and binned by the café and I didn't try again because I now have to start my main project. 

Art and Audience

Art and audience is a project which considers the idea of context and relational aesthetics. I think we're doing it to get us out of the studio, to interact with our audience, we must explore the concepts of performance. Although a performance piece is considered and act in front of an audience it isn't necasserily this stereotypical, Felix Gonzalez-Torres for example showed the image of an empty bed on a billboard and left his audience puzzled, their reaction becoming a part of the performance itself.

Alongside Gonzalez-Torres I have been given a handful of artists to research including


- Gillian Wearing
- Thomas Kilpper
- Mark Jenkins
- Leo Fitzmaurice
- Richard Woods
- Richard Wilson
- Manfred Pernice


I also want to do some further research into Dadaism which I researched during college :)




- Felix González-torres.



He was known for his quiet, minimal installations and sculptures. Using materials such as strings of light bulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or wrapped sweets, his work is sometimes considered a reflection of his experience with AIDS. In 1987 he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education. Along with the other members of the group González-Torres was invited by the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1989 to deal with the subject of AIDS.

González-Torres was considered within his time to be a process artist due to the nature of his 'removable' installations by which the process is a key feature to the installation. Many of his installations invite the viewer to take a piece of the work with them: a series of works allow viewers to take packaged candies from a pile in the corner of an exhibition space and, in so doing, contribute to the slow disappearance of the sculpture over the course of the exhibition. In 1989 González-Torres presented Untitled (Memorial Day Weekend (1) and Untitled (Veterans Day Sale (2), exhibited together as Untitled (Monuments): block-like stacks of paper printed with content related to his private life, from which the viewer is invited to take a sheet. Rather than constituting a solid, immovable monument, the stacks can be dispersed, depleted, and renewed over time.[9] Untitled (1991), however, is a unique stack of 161 signed and numbered silkscreens that remain together. Similar to the 1989 billboard commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, its iteration as a stack of prints was meant, as the artist noted at the time, as a “more private and personal object”—one that is not disseminated physically but instead through the experience of remembering. The stark black page and white typeface on each sheet trace a nonlinear chronology of significant events in the history of the gay-rights movement.

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The most pervasive reading of González-Torres's work takes the processes his works undergo (light bulbs expiring, piles of sweets dispersing, etc.) as metaphor for the process of dying. However, many have seen the works also representing the continuation of life with the possibility of regeneration (replacing bulbs, replenishing stacks or sweets).

Other readings include the issue of public versus private, identity, and participation in contemporary art. One of his most recognizable works, Untitled (1991) seen at the top of this post, was a billboard installed in twenty-four locations throughout New York City of a monochrome photograph of an unoccupied bed, made after the death of his long-time partner, Ross Laycock, from AIDS. Also, Untitled (Placebo) (1991), in one installation, consisted of a six-by-twelve-foot carpet of shiny silver wrapped sweets. Like other sweet pieces in his oeuvre, the works have "ideal weights" which may fluctuate during the course of an exhibition. A borrower may choose to install the work at a weight different than the "ideal weight". The sweet pieces may also be installed in any formation the borrower desires.

In 1990 during Roni Horn’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, González-Torres encountered her sculpture Forms from the Gold Field (1980–82), two pounds of pure gold compressed into a luminous rectangular mat. When he met Horn in 1993, he created "Untitled" (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni (3) (1993), an endlessly replaceable candy spill of gold celophane–wrapped sweets. In 1992 González-Torres was granted a DAAD fellowship to work in Berlin, and in 1993 a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

All of González-Torres' works, with few exceptions, are entitled "Untitled" in quotation marks, sometimes followed by parenthetical title. (This was an intentional titling scheme by the artist).

In one interview, he said "When people ask me, 'Who is your public?' I say honestly, without skipping a beat, 'Ross.' The public was Ross. The rest of the people just come to the work."

González-Torres died in Miami in 1996 due to AIDS related complications.

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