eg_group_installation

The Brief:

In groups, use the space provided to you to make a site-specific immersive installation, considering some of the senses: see, smell, touch, sound. Each person makes an individual piece that comes together at the end.

Collaborative works, although sometimes work out well, can easily be very tricky to cope with, and I found this one quite challenging. My group commit to an ocean themed installation with very little brainstorming and discussion, and jumped straight into allocating jobs for each person to do.

In all honesty, I found it hard to connect to the ocean theme, immediately conjuring up mental images of the Sea Life Centre, and primary school classrooms. It all felt quite 'arts and crafts-y' which made me reluctant to start my own individual piece.

That being said, after talking to and receiving feedback from some lecturers, me and Rowan had a talk and decided to collaborate on our contribution to the group that would benefit the installation as a whole, but fit into our own personal styles.
From this, and the Turner Prize exhibition which included an installation by Cooking Sections that discussed over-fishing, and inspiration from artists such as Do Ho Suh who works with lines and fabrics, we made a fishing nets out of found materials in the classroom (reflecting the environmentally conscious angle the rest of our group was taking) to act as an exit and entrance to the installation.

These are the final nets, hung up in the unfinished installation.
The first is made out of material and fabric we found in the scrap-store and the classroom. We wanted to use found materials so we didn't create any unnecessary waste as a comment on the pollution in the ocean. The mismatched colours further emphasise the 'found' impression we wanted to give.
The second was also made with silver safety blankets that had been found in the classroom. The shiny material reminds me of fishing rods and boats and even shiny scales found on fish.
I think these are effective because they feel tangled up, reflecting the moral dilemmas that concern overfishing and killing endangered animals for food, and also have a recycled feel to them.
Lee also showed us the Curtain Show at Eastside Projects, a show revolving around many different curtains and their uses. The context of our curtains is that they are inviting you into a space. Curtains can also be shutting someone or something out, or enclosing a space.

https://eastsideprojects.org/projects/curtain-show/

These are some pictures of the finished installation.

The walls are covered in tissue paper seaweed, clay sea creatures and painted bubbles, along with the ‘main’ animals; a shark, a turtle and a dolphin, made from cardboard, clay and found rubbish. The floor was covered in (recyclable) rubbish, plastic and the whole thing was lit with a blue light, as well as an attempt to make it smell with a wax burner, with a wax melt named ‘seaside’. The smell did later get overpowered by another group’s project. There was also plastic bags and crochet jellyfish hanging from the ceiling that swayed when the audience moved around the piece. The entrance was covered with fishing net curtains and bin bags, making the audience physically participate in the installation. These were also lit up blue. The materials used in the installation worked quite well. The tissue paper seaweed and the hung up objects moved, making it have an ‘underwater’ feel. The painted bubbles I thought were very effectively done. The silver fishing net sparkled in the light making it look very interesting, especially because of the shape of it. This being said, I did find it a bit hypocritical of us to use new bin bags which would later go to waste for certain elements of the piece, due to the meaning behind it.

Overall I think the installation turned out better than I expected to. This may be because of the lighting which made it feel less literal and ‘crafty’. I also thought the elements hanging from the ceiling gave the room an underwater, immersive sense. I think the lighting could have been better in terms of lighting the whole piece, which was also feedback given from the group. Other feedback mentioned was that it portrayed the feel of the ocean dying due to pollution well because of the immersive feel to the space, ‘making the viewer feel like they’re actually effected by it’.

I learnt a lot from this group project, mainly about the ups and downs working with other people, particularly people you don’t know that well or have much in common with. Obviously if this was a individual project I would have done a lot of things differently, and probably enjoyed the outcome more, but I have also realised that sometimes the point of collaborating with others is to let go of personal tastes, and go with the flow.
This installation was a difficult process but it has taught me how to work in a team, that communication is vital and that compromising and finding solutions everyone is happy with is important in group spaces.