New Project 3: New

This is my first post for a change of direction for this third project.  Initially it was going to be about how society creates barriers towards our engagement with Land, but I have now decided that the way this was going was distancing it from the other projects and that I might actually be able to merge its focus into the Project Lost.  I have written about this decision in other posts and so this post is about an introduction to my new direction.

The new Project 3 has a another simple title for now which is ‘New’.  To start with its focus is also quite simple, which is to use photography to investigate my new neighbourhood.  I am inspired by photographer Stephen Gill who wanders around the area he lives and creates collections of photos based on common connections.  By then putting them together into a collection he then creates further interpretation and understanding about that area.

I have just moved into a new suburb of Glasgow and want to create 3 collections which together investigate the neighbourhood and place I now live in.  The three collections will cover similar issues I am looking into as part of the Project Lost and thus there is potential for them to come together at a later stage but, for now, I don’t want to contextualize it any further and thus give it space to develop and me the freedom just to create these collections.  The three collections will be:

1. Neighbours I have yet to meet – a series of photos of front doors to homes of people who I have yet to meet, and may never meet in today’s modern society.  It reminds me of how as a child I probably knew of just about everybody who lived behind similarly closed doors.
2. Signs and signifiers – a series of photos of signs and signifiers found around my neighbourhood which, when put together, help to create a sense of place to the new neighbourhood I now live in.
3. Places and Land I have yet to discover – a series of photos of open spaces which I have yet to properly engage with.

Together, I expect these collections to create a sense of place and commentary on the place I now live and opportunity for future engagement.

At the moment, the collection on ‘Neighbours I have yet to meet’ includes the following photos:

 

 

 

 

The collection of ‘Signs and Signifiers’ currently includes the following images:

 

 

 

I have still to begins a collection on ‘Places and Land’.

Barriers to Play

I think that I mentioned in an earlier post that I was intending to abandon my original third project Modern Society, which used the process of blackening things out to focus attention, in a slightly threatening way, objects which are keeping us from engaging with Land.  One reason for abandoning this extra project was that it wasn’t quite going in the direction of my other two projects and so I was struggling to keep it connected to them.  However, what I am considering is whether I can utilise this process within Project 1: Lost.  When I was walking around my old estate I came across several examples whereby society had placed barriers in the way of areas where I once used to play and engage with Land.  It was only from my memory of these places that I was able to identify them as barriers, as they often come across today as natural features within an urban landscape.  I therefore realised that it would be difficult to identify such objects within a modern society if I didn’t have my memory to recall, hence the need to use my old estate as the focus of such observations.

Here are a few images that I am playing with which might be featured within the project Lost, if I can find a suitable way of incorporating them into the wider project:

  

  

Developing the project Found

I am starting to realise how important the project Found is as a foil to my thoughts on the project Lost.  I don’t think that I could interrogate Lost to the depths I am thinking about without being able to put those thoughts back into a box (metaphorically and literally) and forget about them awhile whilst I consider some of my current thoughts on life and where I fit in by considering what I call my newly found mature sensibility towards Land.  As an autobiographical reflection this project has thus become my comfort blanket of the things I now ‘find’ myself thinking about.

The following six images are, therefore, both a comparative reflection of my life’s worries and concerns today, whilst also being a contrasting foil in style, subject matter and message, when compared with the project Lost.  They are pictorial in their aesthetic style yet are of subjects that aren’t typically chosen for their instrumental beauty.  I am trying to highlight within them the intrinsic beauty of Land’s struggle for survival within its own environment.  At the moment I have chosen the following six images to portray this focus, but as this progresses I will need to think about ways in which I can enhance the message within – I have some thoughts about this but I will leave that for a later post, perhaps: