-Ash Robinson
This pattern was my late grandmother's favorite pattern
Sunday, February 6, 2011
"Helter Shelter"
As an artist, thoughts of ideas run rapid though my mind. These thoughts have always been plagued by questions of uncertainty. In the previous months, this uncertainty has co-existed with a lack of progression of making work. Suddenly, my identity had been hijacked! The work or lack there of had been halted and what I knew to be me had changed. My "shelter" had been dismantled and my comfort level went from 10 to 0. In the next few weeks I am going to investigate this absence of comfort in a project entitled "Helter Shelter." This project will allow me to focus on aspects of my past that brought comfort on a conscious and subconscious level. Things that I perceived as child that fed my innocence and safety from the unfamiliar. The feeling of nostalgia is what I hoping to capture in this piece by focusing on objects that bring peace or a sense of love such as jewelry, hand stitched quilts, crocheted blanket, and other heirlooms. I am also interested in the connection that these types of object have with women. There is a painting by German painter Gabriele Munter, Return from Shopping Trip, 1908-09, (no image) that depicts a women torso after a shopping. This painting, among other things, touches on the perception of women by the objects she possesses. The Challenge is designing an object that can inhabit the feeling of nostalgia while also raising questions about connection of women to objects.
-Ash Robinson
-Ash Robinson
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You need more images - I need to get a sense of who you are and what moves you as a "designer".
ReplyDeleteI agree with Wendy, but I'm also curious how you would like to incorporate that pattern or texture into the shelter piece. It would be nice to show other artists that you look at who utilize similar patters, materials, and textures (i.e. Nick Cave).
ReplyDeleteWith nostalgia you have taken on a subject near and dear to my heart. It's tricky. It turns out that there is more to nostalgia than our perception of sugary christmas cookies and simpler days of yore. The term was coined in 1688 by Swiss scientist Johannes Hofer. He had been given the task of figuring out why Swiss soldiers were failing in foreign theaters of war. The word nostalgia (nostos=home, -algos=pain or ache) literally describes homesickness and Hofer suggested military leave. But with further research, Hofer deepens his inquiry and describes nostalgia as a longing for a place person or thing in which the subject holds "erroneous representations" as real memory.
ReplyDeleteHofer's characterization of 'nostalgia' as an illness was supplanted in the late 19th century by Freud's work on Mourning and Melancholy. In a nutshell, melancholy occurs when a grieving person cannot break the grieving cycle because he/she cannot/will not find an object of transference. Freud talks about nostalgia being an aspect, or perhaps, symptom of melancholy. Further, the accepted notion of the late Victorian age was that melancholy was a special province inhabited mainly (if not exclusively) by poets, artists, and, you guessed it, women.
So. I can see a number of ways in which you could plug into the correlation between nostalgia and home; home and the things in the home; and, in particular, things in the home from a woman of another generation. I wonder what you'll discover if you question and perhaps subvert your own "erroneous" perceptions of that space of time and material place of comfort. It may sound as though I am asking you to mine some revisionist and distopian past; but in fact I intuitively think it might lead you into terrain in which you find humor and solace. A space between who you think you were back then and who, in fact, you are now.