lots of lead

For our group installation we are working on the brief 'Lead Chest' and trying to make a piece to fit in John Soane's Pitzhanger Manor. Everyone in my group is doing different things, but some of us are experimenting with materials. Luckily we found a guy who works with roofing called Steve who gave us all these lead scraps for free. So now we're going to try and melt it/ weather it, scrape it and possibly try and drop it out of a window. We'll see what happens.
Steve I will love you to my dying day

Final Blanket (yet another treat for my lovely flatmates)

I started looking at some work by Issey Miyake, Ernesto Neto etc for some inspiration. I really like Miyake's A poc (A Piece of Cloth) pieces where the entire outfit is cut out of, surprise surprise, one piece of cloth. This image is taken at the catwalk show for the apoc collection. It ties in nicely to the ideas I have for my blanket piece- connecting people together, linking their movements so that when they sit down/ stand/ lean against the corridor wall the others connected to the piece are forced to mirror one another.

I thought this pic below, was just really funny. Its a piece done by a student in Louisiana called Mary Hale. It's called Itinerant Home.

 Getting the piece ready- lots of pinning and sewing.

After talking to Lucy, my tutor, I realised I would have to attach extra panels of fabric to allow my flatmates to sit and kneel whilst their heads and arms were in the suits. I cut right through the panels, up and around the head and arm holes and sewed more of the stretchy fabric in.

 The door panels all sewn and ready

 Laura's not a fan of having her photo taken, but I like this picture, she looks like a little caterpillar.

Final film

Something Granny and Annie would appreciate

I thought Granny would be pleased to see my shiny red new sewing machine ( that ma got, thank you!) and Annie would be pleased to see that her birthday prezzie to me is being put to good use

Some more crazy corridor experiments

I started sewing together these pieces made of stretchy fabric. I attached them to the my door and one to Laura's door and tried to show different ways of extending the personal spaces of our rooms into the corridor. My tutor Lucy, referred to them as 'dialogue blankets' but my flatmates called them monkey suits. Either way, they are prep pieces for a blanket that I'm making to focus on the corridor activity and physically depict the interactions that take place in the space.

Casting

A couple of weeks ago I started doing some casts to develop the 'fragments' we are expected to have as a result of the annex project. I start to look at the doorhandles in the flat- the keys to enter the group space of the corridor. I was looking at ways of making it clear that people were free to enter each others rooms. So I asked Claudia to print her hand grip around my door handle using plasticine- then I cast the handle. I used alginate- which dentists use to take casts of people's teeth, so it smells minty. Its a natural seaweedy formula which picks up alot of detail. Then I used plaster in the alginate cast.
It took two attempts to get it right, but I'm happy with how it went. It was a bit scary when my door lock stopped working though. I think alginate got into the keyhole- but everything is fine and dandy now.

Drawing of corridor ghost

Here is a 3 layered drawing I did of the den i made in the hall. It was quite odd doing such a precise and proportioned drawing, but I thought I'd give it ago. Thank you Laura and Thom for letting me take yet more photos of them opening their bedroom doors.

Door alarms

I wanted to call this post 'Door Bells' but then that sort of implies the opposite of what this little experiment was about. I've been thinking more about the corridor and the ways I can make the space an open area that everyone uses- not just somewhere to pass through on the way in and out of our rooms. The idea stemmed from how whenever we enter the corridor a light sensor registers our presence and the light flickers on. I liked this sense of being welcomed into a space. I thought I could extend this so that a bell of some sort registers when we have opened our doors. As I've mentioned before, we all prop our doors open when we're feeling sociable so that everyone can come and go from the corridor and each other's rooms. So the bells would indicate when we were propping our doors open- like a call to everyone else in the flat to be sociable.

So far I've made 'bells' for Claudia, Laura and me. Each time I've only used things that belong to each person so as to project each person into the annex of the corridor. Claudia does a lot of dance and has a hip scarf for belly dancing which is covered in little jangling medallions. For Laura I made a wire frame to hook a tin around the door handle, then I filled the tin with her rings. Finally for me, I made a chime out of my cutlery ( I'm known as the mum of the flat, because I cook a lot so it seemed to fit). I attached a nut (as in nut and bolt) to a string that then attached to my door handle so the chime rang.

Claudia's room

If anyone knows why these photos automatically rotate themselves please let me know!

Laura's room

My Room

I'm not completely sure where this idea is going to lead me to next. I could put the chimes up one evening and film the corridor to see all the alarms going off. I could also make a tally of how many times I hear each different alarm. I'm not sure, but I'll keep you (meaning mum, dad, annie and granny) posted. 

More shenanigans in the corridor

.... and more proof that I have the most tolerant flatmates in uni history.
This evening I was thinking of more way to annex the corridor in our flat. I want to make it a part of the flat, not just something we pass through from the front door to our rooms or the kitchen. I noticed the other day that we all prop our doors open when we're feeling sociable, so as to show people are welcome to wonder in and out. What I like is the different ways we all prop the heavy fire doors open. A few of us use converse trainers- the gap between the door and the floor is quite wide and converse seem quite good. I used a book at first until the spine looked a bit knackered. But Megan uses her clarinet and then a pair of trainers. I thought of making a group door stop that could open all our doors at the same time and create one big sociable space.

As a quick experiment this evening I tried to create a makeshift canopy/den between Laura and Thom's rooms. Their doors are open almost all the time so i wanted to create a cosy little space for them to meet under- sort of like when your a kid . Me and Jess (my sister) used to sit under a blanket on the sofa and pretend the sofa could fly anywhere (but that's perhaps a bit off the point).

I tied thread between they're rooms, using their door handles, chairs and the radiator to wind the thread around. I wanted some more sturdy string to make sure the support didn't buckle or snap, but I don't have any at the mo. So I just had to be very very careful.

Here's a film of when I got them to open and close their doors- in turn destroying the makeshift annex. Which I quite liked. The annex only exists when they want it to- when they want to come out and use the corridor space.