Personal objects can tell stories, have history and are often the most precious things to an individual. We attach these objects to a memory, a feeling or a sentiment. I decided to sketch that which means something to me. This began with my mother's scent 'Chanel No5'. The smell actively takes me back to smelling my mother in her camel coat on the way to a ball. It reminds me of old earrings she used to wear. The scent is attached to far more than just a smell. The scent has whole memories attached to it. This attachment is not physical, rather emotional and infallible. The imagery I associate with the perfume is vivid and can present a potent focus upon family, nostalgia and memory.
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| Sketches Author's Own |
I sketched also my pair of sunglasses. A pair bought to replace those lent to and lost by my brother when travelling in Europe. The original pair were bought in Paris and symbolised to me the family holiday we had spent there. I am attracted to the idea of an artificial token. The idea that I have endeavoured to replace the lost pair of meaningful glasses, an although they are physically identical, the new pair just simply isn't the first. I see humour in imagining the journey the lost pair might perhaps have gone along. The reality is that both are just pairs of sunglasses, however the notion of emotional attachment makes one thing far more precious than another even though they look the same and are equal in financial worth.
I took I moment to think of specific images lasting in my mind from the last few days. I decided to go back and sketch the photographs I had taken of the Serpentine Sackler by Zaha Hadid. I chose to offset the man-made structure with focus on the surrounding trees of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. This for me is an exploration of the relationship between made-made structures and the structures of nature. The trees seemed in fact more rigid and less natural somehow than the fluid movement and reflection of light of Hadid's constructed and un natural building. Established mindset assumes that nature is less regimented and 'structured' than human construction yet I feel it important to explore how this might not be the case and that we as humans can be more creative with juxtaposing materials and forms; as opposed to nature where a tree always comprises of roots, bark and leaves (a formulaic natural structure).
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Sketch Author's own
Serpentine Sackler |
When sketching a South East London tower block from the view on my balcony, with the intention to explore the relationship between a very rigid man-made structure and the then extremely structureless seeming tress. I became more fascinated however with the idea of levels, floors and height. I thought immediately back to my mind-map and my discussion of human class systems and levelling. I imagined a different type of person one each floor of my sketched tower block. A different culture. A different financial situation. A different class. I thought too of the reality that the inhabitants of this tower block would all be from a similar class- the working class. The image of the tower block then became to me prison-like. The building's rigid structure symbolises the inhabitants entrapment in the rigid societal structure of our times; times where affordable housing is few and far between and many have to resort to far out locations or sub-par tower housing.
This musing threw my focus back on to one of my first questions 'is structure a positive or a negative thing?'. I am beginning to build up a picture of a potential approach to the brief that can explores both, class systems, what our position in the social structure might lead us to feel attached to as well as the hidden structures of nature and what the world might look/be like without some form of system.
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