chapter 1 - a brief history of personal objects

On October 19th, I booked out the infinity table and asked people to bring in some objects of importance. Although the RSVP was good, on the day only a few people showed up and I feel like that was probably for the best as I hadn't properly researched and dug into the use of the infinity table.

The photos I gathered were nice, but I wasn't very happy with where I was within my project and in all honestly I was starting to feel like I didn't want to keep it up.

So then I had a chat with Emily, and we found a similar interest in our projects. The same happened with Brodie and Kylan, and soon we became a four people team. After a group meeting, we decided to focus on the idea of homely objects. Here is our draft treatment for the idea:

Treatment for ‘A Brief History of Personal Objects’

The source would be bringing objects that would normally not leave one’s flat outside or into a studio space to create an atmosphere of oddness and puzzlement, accompanied by a soundtrack of each location and an intimate dialogue between two people about their stories via mention of the said objects.

This project started off as four separate ideas:

•  Ance’s idea being looking into people’s connections with their belongings. 
•  Kylan’s idea being an abstract portrait of home and family relationships. 
•  Emily’s idea being how an object can change value based on its environment and looking at the history of an object. 
•  Brodie’s idea being an investigation between peoples relationship with installation art, specifically focusing on the projection beam and themes of escapism and freedom within westernised society. 

The starting point for the development of this particular idea was Lucy May Schofield’s book Belongings, wherein people brought in objects that meant something to them, but never revealed their value to the authors, who then wrote a paragraph about the item based simply on its appearance.

We decided to explore home - the space closest to us - and its floorplan and the objects within. We chose specific objects of value to us, and stripped them of their surroundings, placing them into locations that we would normally visit on our walks and daily routines to create a new, surreal space that explores the mundane by making the audience question what these items mean.

As this is an abstract piece, it would be more ambiguous rather than narrative based, thereby open to audience’s interpretation of its meaning. Because of it’s ambiguous nature, our process in creating this is integral to our understanding of the piece as well. As we place these objects in different environments we’ll discover new meanings beyond our initial understandings. The meanings behind the objects and places therefore will evolve throughout our process.