Birthday Memories

Developing own ideas is the key for coming up with a great artwork in the end. All those outcomes from different artists have unique handwritings. That is resulting from the fact that each artist expresses old memories, feelings or stories in their representations.

When looking at our task to create a two dimensional and afterwards a three dimensional object based on our memory presents an example for visualising birthday memories is Sophie Calle. She created boxes in which she put her birthday gifts. Her unique piece of art is called “The Birthday Ceremony 1980-1993”.

I started the project with writing down my birthday presents which I could still remember. During that it is necessary to be SLOWER, THOUGHTFUL, MEDITATIVE.
My idea was also to sketch some images relating to the words.
While doing the task I realized that I could barely remember a lot of my gifts, especially the ones from my first five birthdays. Therefore I realized that it is important to document/photograph every moment in life which I want to remember in the future.

To get some ideas for the next task to design a large sheet of paper with text and images based on birthday presents we looked at some artists and their work like Kate Morass.
She drew in graffiti letters her thoughts on a sheet of paper.
Jeremy Dellar designed a mind map where he connects different words by sketching lines between them.
Peter Davies structured his text before he wrote it down on the paper.

Inspired by those pieces of art I wanted to organise the birthday presents first. Therefore I started to write down my date of birth and then my presents. In between those I painted errors to create a structure.

While doing that I did not know the meaning of doing the task. It reminded me on a primary school activity. My sheet of paper also looked childish because of the different colours and images.

The good part was that my paper was stuffed with different paintings and words so there was not a lot of white space left.

After that we were supposed to transfer the two dimensional object into a three dimensional object by cutting out the white spaces between words and images.
It was hard to get rid of all the white spaces because some words and images included white.
From that point I understood the aim of the project. It was to teach us about the different dimensions and how one idea could end in a totally different way.

An example for that task is Matthew Ritchie.

The string structure was now a line of my birthday gifts. The individual work became a group presentation as all of us hanged our artworks on strings which were stretched across the room.

By showing a music video on a screen behind the work the atmosphere in the room became special.

Ghost objects which were made out of white paper cut into silhouettes underlined the atmosphere.
Seeing those different objects and realizing that each of us had created an unique piece of art helped me to understand the beauty of this artwork.
I enjoyed looking at our final outcome.

 

 

The final task was an individual one. I choose to take my string structure and transfer it into mosaic because it should stress that my memories are not ordered in my brain. Some of them are lost but all of them made me to the person I am today like mosaic which is made out of thousand little pieces that produce a bigger and different shaped object.

In conclusion I enjoyed doing that task even if I had worries in the beginning. I learned that an artist work bases on its own experiences and expresses unique feelings.
In addition I got to know how to visualise my memories by transferring birthday presents into a two dimensional and afterwards into a three dimensional object as well as realizing that ideas develop during the project.