Co-lab 1 for me was split into two parts: Firstly ‘Lost and Found’ and then ‘Traces’.
Lost and Found
I began this project looking at a rather unusual item from the GSA Archives and Collections: Margaret Macdonald’s hair. This was an extremely interesting subject to me because although I found the item rather repulsive, I also thought that it was oddly beautiful. On this train of thought, I went down the path of considering why hair is viewed as beautiful on the human head but then is deemed as disgusting once separated from it. This led to me thinking of past times I have lost my own hair, making me fall upon the memory of a specific playground fight I was involved in at around six years old with the playground bully, Andrea, who pulled out half of my hair. I have tried to replicate exactly the feelings I first felt towards Margaret Macdonald’s hair within my piece for the viewer to experience first-hand; disgust, intrigue, and perhaps even appreciation for the beauty of the hair itself, regardless of the full object.
Traces
My animated short, ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1’, is based around one of my own dearest types of archive: record collections. Music is something so nostalgic, so memory and emotion inducing and so character defining that a record collection, completely unique to the person who owns it, is completely inseparable from the person they have developed into over time. I wanted to play on this – reaching out to my friends to rack their brains and record shelves alike for inspiration and insights into their tastes – in order to create a stop motion animation that depicts the cycle of life (from conception to procreation). We mostly follow the narrative of one central character (un-gendered with no set appearance, in order to accentuate the idea of the global adoration of music), who is created entirely from a stream of album covers, merged together to create an ever-growing-human effect. This animation is also a constantly looping gif with an end and beginning which link seamlessly to one another (this can be found on my research page), meaning that the cycle never pauses or stops; a constant flow of life.