The Gusserane Art Intervention: Week 2

For the second week of the workshops in Gusserane, Els and I had decided to give presentations to the children to show the kind of work we produced as visual artists. (In the end my presentation ended up taking so long that Els decided that we leave hers until another time.)

For my presentation I showed the children my final year work "The Constitution of Shadows: 90%", which is a 40 piece slideshow accompanied by a 17 min sound piece. The slides are handmade and consist mostly of negative film, the main focus of my presentation was to show the children my interests in analog film and technology as well as the use of light in my work. I brought in my Hanimax slide projector to project the slides in their original format alongside a digital projector connected to my laptop to show the negative slides in positive form.

The slide projector and slides intrigued the pupil's interest and with both groups I showed them each individual slide and then covered over the light of the projector to show the digital positive formats as well. The colour films ones especially show distinct differences in colour and with this I could explain to the children thr process that is behind old analog photography. This was quite new for them as they are a young generation whom are exposed more so to quick and convenient digital cameras, both groups having only one or two children whom were aware of these technologies.

(Above: showing the pupils the positive format of the negative slide below).

I also managed to partially talk about the concepts behind the work, about how with photographs we feel we see a snapshot of reality whereas there are actually all of these layers and processes behind an image that creates an illusion of what we see. With the slide above in particular, the mark across the image is actually a scratch I made on the film itself, in which I took out the slide from the projector and showed the children the very physical attribute the film has.

Here Els asked the pupils a very good question: "If Tara was a painter, what would her canvas be?". It was met with a lot of hopeful answers and scratching of heads, and when the answer was revealed to be simply light, the children seemed to understand the medium in a different way. Especially how the image is so small and minute in the slide, and when light is shone through, the image is brought to life in bigger dimensions.

The presentation then became a guessing game as to what the pupils thought the images were when looking at the negative and then seeing the other version in the positive. This was another aspect to the piece, questioning what you see and not necessarily just accepting it because it appears real.

At the end of the presentation with both groups Els asked tha the children draw their favourite slide from memory. One slide in particular was quite popular and we felt it was because of how large and strong the lettering of the slide showed up through the projector. (shown below).

We also challenged the children to figure out whether they were drawing the positive or the negative of the image, this depending on what they drew as dark and light. It was also to make them consider more of what they were drawing, like in the exercise in week 1, and to pay attention to certain details, perspective and filling out the page. The pupils responded well to this task, many of them focusing on completion of filling in areas in black especially.

For the next week I suggested to them that we do a slide making workshop and have them create their own handmade slides in a similar fashion to my own methods.