I have been working with the many, many buttons I have collected over the years - the ones you get attached to a coat or shirt in a plastic jiffy bag 'just in case'. They are lovely things when you line them up in their little bags. And I thought about the privacy of the buttons and how they belong in their individual bags if we are to treat them as an authentic record of their function and of my relationship or history with them.
I must have been thinking about this when I was making some colour photocopies of my diary covers and the string that binds them, because I thought about how the buttons in their bags have a degree of privacy, and that I am grappling with ideas around privacy with my diary work - that I want at once to both reveal and disguise what is there - that the diaries authenticity is in part its status as 'a private thing'....
I am now thinking that it would be interesting to symbolically 'shut' the diaries before revealing them as authentic records. This might involve gluing the pages together one by one before mounting the shut diary for display...or encasing a diary in something I've made, sealing it (as if it were a spare button) inside forever but celebrating it too through the process of making its shroud. This might involve the employment of those authentic creative processes I wanted to pick up on - playful things like weaving and plaiting and adorning with buttons and ribbons.
I look forward to exploring this more - it might have potential.
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About Me
- Han
- Lecturing in art and design is a lovely job and I dont take it for granted. I am really interested in the quality of what we do here and firmly believe that people who study art at university level have a distinct advantage over those who dont. So I suppose my job is to prove it.
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