WELCOME
Welcome to our first online exhibition; Exhibition: Work in Progress.
We want to share with you a bit about how we were able to work collaboratively from opposing ends of the country, alongside fluctuating health and workloads.
Many of the works you’ll see in this exhibition are ‘unfinished’, as part of our creative aim was to see what happened if we tried out the ‘Creative Day Method’, which we developed after our first meeting. The experiment is complete in itself, and so some of the works are more like gestures to what we might have created had we more time & resources & energy.
In our first meet-up, we explored what kinds of things were relevant to us, what kinds of things were important to us in terms of the practice we wanted to create.
Image Description – a screenshot of an ideas board we made using JamBoard. a white background with various squares containing single word text in different shaped and coloured squares.
the method
Creative Collaboration Idea 1
Agree a date and a rough time frame within which we will all be logged onto the water cooler. This could count as one of our creative days.
Decide on (3) prompts or themes
First theme: we each go away for 1(?) hour and create something based on this theme
We then (photograph/copy/paste) share what we have done with another member (-> e.g. Ellie send to Jacqui, Jacqui to Charlie, Charlie to Ellie )
EITHER:
Go away again for an hour to create another piece on the first theme in response to the work we have been sent by each other & repeat this one more time so that we have produced 3 layered pieces all on one theme. Our next two creative days could then involved this activity but on the other two themes.
OR
Introduce second theme: We go away for an hour to create something in response to the art we have been sent by each other based on the second theme. Return & share to the remaining person, then go away for an hour and create something in response to their piece based on the third and final theme. Then we have three pieces (pieces = work in progress mash-ups) with three layers containing a different theme each
We thought of a number of variations of how we could do these ‘Creative Days’ together, and tried out these new ways of having the equivalent of ‘studio’ time together (click the headings below to expand the text).
Each ‘creative day’, we would first agree a prompt together.
We often looked back to our Jamboard from our first meeting, which contained a range of concepts, images, practical things that we had acknowledged were important to us.
We would always spend a bit of time discussing the theme and sharing our initial reactions and thoughts to it before ‘going away’ to create something inspired by the prompt.
Our task then for the day was to create something in response to the prompt word or phrase.
We would turn off our cameras and microphones and agree a time frame – usually between 1 and 1.5 hrs to include a break. We’d then create something and return at the agreed time to share what we had done, as well as what our processes were in that hour.
We’d share our work with each other and reflect on how we used the creative time, why we chose to use certain materials or sounds, and what we might do to develop that piece of work.
This was often followed by further individual reflections which we shared in diary entries, and would frequently result in new ‘spin-off’ works being created as well as finishing off what we had started in the session.
