Stolen Treasures
Colourful wooden block participatory sculpture.
This sculpture is based on Felix Gonzales-Torrez's piece "Untitled". The idea is to use that audience as the uncontrollable factor. This is shown through the number of blocks they take, choosing to take 1, 20 or none at all, which will fluctuate the pile.
To make this sculpture piece into reality, I needed to find a material where I could get a large quantity where it would not cost much.
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While looking through some woodshop bins, I found a lot of free scrap wood that can be repurposed for my idea.
I cut the wood into handheld sized pieces and sanded each block to make it smooth to touch. The idea was to create these pieces where people would want to come and touch them to take as the intention for them to be given away for the audience to keep.
Painting blocks
When choosing the colours for the blocks, I knew that I wanted them to connect to the community and the organisation of Project4Change. I decided to do the colours of the logo of Project4Change and the colour colours of the two community morals, which I was a part of in either designing or painting. This narrowed it down to this colour scheme, and I plan to use these colours throughout the different pieces.
Cowgate Centre Mural Blakelaw Centre Mural
I hand-painted all the blocks in the colours that I have chosen using acrylic paint and a paint brush.
Lino print - Tote bag designs
I wanted to find a way to add the young people to this piece. The idea is to show that the blocks are the young people's treasures, similar to how Blakelaw Park is precious to them because it's where they play and hang out with their friends.
At the end of January, I decided to use the construction of the Sports hub at Blakelaw Park as my project topic. During this decision, I led Tote bag painting sessions to raise money for their Year11 prom with a group of young people as a community artist in Project4Change. They have produced so many designs beforehand when working with these young people. Some of the designs didn't make it onto tote bags themselves. I thought of using eight designs to turn into Lino stamps to add a design to each coloured block. So when a person takes a block, they are taking a little piece of the young people's design as well as it strengthens the meaning of the participatory piece.
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I originally was going to add 15 designs but changed to 8 as I felt that I wouldn't have time to make many lino stamps and 8 had plenty of variation.
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From the designs chosen I made the designs easy to transfer and resize by tracing them digitally and put into one page. I choose simple designs as they are better craved into lino where it will have a clean image print.
I printed out the designs on A4 paper, and I used that to trace the image using tracing paper. The graphite of the tracing paper transferred well onto the lino sheet. These markings indicated which areas I should carve.
This is how the stamps came out. From the printed 15 designs, I chose the 8 designs that were the easiest to carve into the lino sheet. Before printing the lino stamps onto the coloured blocks, I printed them on paper to see how they would look.
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I used two colours of printing ink. I chose to do white, purple and blue and black, yellow and pink to create variation and for the design to stand out from the colour.
Making the net
I wanted to create a net for the pile of blocks. I tried to aim for this piece to have much meaning, which will go hand in hand with the action done by the audience taking the blocks.
The situation with Blakelaw Park has two components: it stops the young people from keeping the park as it is. The first is money and power; the council is adding this sports hub, which is expensive to build and will bring in much money to the area as people will use it. This would be represented by the audience taking the block as they have to power to take the blocks. The second will be mainly represented by the net, which is the powerlessness of the community's young people.
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The net that I will create will not serve as a proper net as I will purposely make the net have large net holes where the audience will be able to take a block through the net; the net will be laid loosely on the pile of blocks. It makes the net ironic as nets are made to keep items safe and reinforce the meaning of the little power that the young people have to change or save what is in their community.
I made the net by braiding 4 yarn strands in 3. Similar to braiding hair. I tried to create a large square of 200cm by 200cm and just estimated the size to make the small squares within the large one. I stretched the net by taping and pinning it with small pegs onto the wall to see how the net looked. I secured all the pieces in the smaller squares by tying two short pieces of yarn into two areas to which I wanted to be attached.
Putting together at Shaune Project Space crit...
I treated the Shaun Project space critic as a mock exhibition to see what I envisioned at the halfway point of my project and planned to put it all together and see what it looks like currently. I got to see how my blocks look with the net, and I prepared for the net to be white so the blocks would stand out more; I thought this worked well.
I had two ideas of how I would layout the blocks in the space. The first layout was to use the corner of the room and pile the blocks from the corner. The second layout was to pile the blocks in the middle of the space creating a cone shape. These two layouts are inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres's set-up in the piece "untitled".
Although I made many blocks, it wasn't enough for the fullness and height I wanted, similar to the pile of sweets from Felic Gonlazes-Torres' "untitled". It wasn't an option to make more blocks as it's a very long process. Instead, I wanted to create height by putting the blocks on something. I found this small round table that I thought would be perfect as the square of the table emphasised the cone shape that I wanted the pile to show. The industrial feel of the table fits with the construction, such as the scaffolding in the photographs.
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The table that I have chosen was also too small to support all the blocks on the table. So I thought of putting the blocks on the floor to imitate the net not being able to hold the blocks correctly, so they fell, which emphasises the meaning of the net. The table became an excellent addition to the piece.
Final Exhibition placement
I kept the same set-up as the Shaun Project Space critique for the exhibition. I used the same table and stacked the blocks as high as possible, leaving some blocks on the floor to indicate that it was spilling out with the net lying on top of the pile.
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I also placed the pile in a similar area of the space. I thought the position of the piece was perfect where it is. I made sure that there was enough room to walk around it to look at the designs and colours thoroughly.
I never considered that the coloured blocks could be appealing to be played with. Similar to large building blocks that toddlers would use to play by stacking. Here I have two of my friends who came to look at my exhibition and played with the blocks majority of their visit. They wanted to bring more than one block and looked through different designs. They took their time choosing as they intended to display them in their home. They picked blocks to build and connect to show four different designs and colours. They had fun looking through while enjoying the company of each other.
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These are the blocks that they've chosen after looking through the blocks.
Exhibition Statement: Stolen Treasures
Stolen treasures
Sculpture – Painted wooden blocks with lino design prints + braided net displayed on a table.
I searched for these pieces of wood through the bins. I selected the wood, cut them into handheld pieces and sanded them to be smooth to the touch. I hand-painted each block using the colours blue, purple, pink and yellow, which are the colours of the Project4Change logo and the colours of the two community centre murals in the area.
The coloured blocks represent everything that is important and holds value to the young people in the community. I wanted to make these blocks more personal, so I contributed designs that the young people created. I worked alongside the young people to develop their tote bag designs to raise money for their Year 11 prom. These sessions took place around the same time as the start of constructing the sports hub in Blakelaw park. I selected 8 designs from 8 different young people and took these designs and turned them into lino stamps. I stamped each coloured block with one design.
The net that I placed loosely hugs the pile of coloured blocks. This net tries to hold all the blocks but fails to do so as it was purposely made to have larger net holes. The large holes make it easier for the audience to take a block from the pile. This makes the net ironic as the nets are made to keep items safe, but this net allows the audience to grab through and get the block.
Please take a coloured block.