Category: 2020/21

Our CoLab 2 project looks at the story and reason behind the places we have researched. By looking from different perspectives we have made a collection of work which reflects the way in which someone sees our chosen area and the narrative behind them. We looked at the history, purpose and emotional value an area has on a person and created works of personal interest which show, in our own perspectives, the way in which people may react to such environments.

Experience:

Place:

Links:

Our CoLab 2 project looks at the story and reason behind the places we have researched. By looking from different perspectives we have made a collection of work which reflects the way in which someone sees our chosen area and the narrative behind them. We looked at the history, purpose and emotional value an area has on a person and created works of personal interest which show, in our own perspectives, the way in which people may react to such environments 

Experience:

Place:

Links:

We invite you to explore a fictional route that links our habitats together, it acts like a tour guide allowing you to explore our pages in a fun way. In this zine we show our habitats through our own perspectives and the personal relationship we hold with them. Each of us has shown a representation of this connection in our own way. 

My habitat is a town called High Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire. I was born here, and I’ve lived there ever since. Throughout my life I have become intimately familiar with the town. As I’ve grown up, I’ve developed my own internal diorama – shaped by experiences, memories and childhood imaginings that have accidentally become cemented into its foundations. I’ve approached my section of the zine with this in mind and have tried to show High Wycombe as I see it. 

I explored Falkirk, the town I have lived in for the majority of my life. Being influenced by the text by Robert Smithson I looked for the insignificant around the significant and showed what Falkirk is really like to the people living here. I gave the town a whole new light with a comedic twist on a classical travel brochure.

My current location is my hometown named Guangzhou. But I consider my habitat as three specific places around Guangzhou. Downtown Guangzhou, where are surrounded by tons of buildings, I spend a lot of time there. An abandoned factory very near to my home, I witness how worse it get through these years. And also the river near to my family’s summer house, which carried many childhood memories of mine. These three places symbolize the present, past, and future of my hometown and represent my emotion as well. I choose to used collages to show the way I see them.

I am living in a city called Glasgow now . I just came to this city for less than four months. I am not very familiar with everything here, so I will provide a tourist side to understand Glasgow.I chose the street near my flat, the way people go to work and the park I often go to. I collected the characteristics of these places and remembered the feeling of them. Then I used images to show what these places look and feel like in my memory.

 It would be difficult to say that these places are all the same with a clear connection. They all have different characteristics that stand out to us and make them our habitats, however this zine is the link that connects us all together through our differences.

Experience:

Place:

Links:

We took our individual styles in communicating the idea that we stuck in this environment where we see everything but can’t touch; like the shops seeing the displays but can’t go inside,  similar to zoom we can see each other but haven’t physically met each each other.

Experience:

Place:

Links:

In response to “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” by Robert Smith, we photographed our local environments and collectively decided to explore the theme of abandonment whether through objects, environments, but particularly ruination. Focalising on abandoned structures, highlight them as monuments like in the Smithson text, we wanted to raise awareness of what we’ve left behind. We continued to explore this theme introducing collecting combined with photography to create anthropomorphic structures constructed from discarded and forgotten objects salvaged from our habitats. We believed that the objects that were thrown away are a reflection of the people that lived in that environment and through personifying the rubbish we were making people more conscious of what they had abandoned. We decided to individually respond to the same theme of abandonment reflecting on anthropomorphology, Japanese zen ideals of Wabi-Sabi, aesthetics of the sublime, and the entropic city through sculpture, collage, and digital art. To culminate the project we’re presenting our work side by side in a virtual gallery space.

Experience:

Programme:

Place:

SERENDIPITY/RANDOMNESS

Having researched psychogeography and its various suggested methods of exploring our habitat we decided to do a Dice Walk. This involves throwing a dice to determine what direction to follow. 1 or 2 denotes turn left, 3 or 4 straight ahead and 5 or 6 turn right. Collectively we ( Joe Cole, Elssa Kalala, Erin O’Sullivan and Susie McClymont) chose to do a walk incorporating 20 throws of the dice.

Walking in different parts of the country we then met again on Zoom where we combined 80 images which was too wieldy a number to work with. Using numbers 1 to 20 randomly picked out of a bag we matched them to our names, also randomly selected, arriving at a sum of 20 images, 5 from each of us. We returned to our five sites for further research and simultaneously took sound bites when there. A Powerpoint incorporating our 20 images and soundbites are shown.

Keen to do some form of combined work and in the spirit of CoLab we felt that collage would be a possible method of doing that remotely, as we could share images and then combine them in a different way. At the same time mixing our habitats together.

Shown here are individual collages we made of our own images, followed by photomontage  of the 20 images together.

Experience:

Place:

Our project focuses on the monumental and unmonumental and how this has changed in relation to COVID. We focused in particular on how daily walks, that were once seen as unmonumental have now transformed into a significant part of our daily lives. We looked at how we have become hyper aware of ourselves and how we move around space in relation to others, feeling increasingly conscious of judgment about how we use outdoor space.

Experience:

Place:

Links:

In trying to combat the troubles of working collaboratively in a Lockdown environment. Our team realised in our development of our project, that not only were we mapping our own environments. We each were contributing to a shared virtual environment that we all inhabited. It was then that we decided to run with this idea and be as creative as possible. What we have created we are extremely proud of and we hope you enjoy the work also.

Experience:

Place:

Links: