W2 - Initial ideas about individual installation

My first ideas were about black and death stimulated by finding a pile of heavy black plastic in the studio and by hearing about on-line memorials on Radio National as I was driving in, and then recalling an art exhibition about death that I visited in Dresden at its Hygeine Museum and a recent Australian book on the sociology of death and dying.

This conjured ideas about who owns the dead, the fetishisation of corpses by funeral parlours, who tells, edits, embellishes or changes 'their' story. I envisaged constructing a fake memorial, a blog on death and memory, video of media images of the dead, collection of Warhol-like images of people in coffins. I even had a few possible titles: 'Consolations' or 'Translation to Memory' or 'Pornography of the Corpse'. I still think this sound create...but it quickly seemed unlikely to be doable in the time avaialable.

Having been told there was about to be a hard rubbish collection in St Albans, I left the campus and drove around the area for an hour and 'liberated' a variety of objects that interested me. Here there are (cat not included):




As a result of sitting with these objects for a few days, I completed revised my idea to turning the studio space into a black cube into which I put some things that had to be felt and something that had to be listened to. Another possible title presented itself: 'Anechoic Sensorium'! Then I thought it might be effective if there was a big contrast between the feeling of the confined cube and a more echoey recording. I even recorded part of the warm-up of one of my choirs which rehearses in a hall with a high ceiling.