The Library – Research

This project took me a long time to conceptualise. First of all, I always have a desperate need to connect with my work. I need that motivation of feeling passionate about what I was doing and the message I was sending. I sat myself in the library for three hours, staring into space, into the ceiling, at the books. I probably came off as insane with all the looking around I was doing. I ended up having quite an artist block with this project initially, because no matter what idea I tossed out, I hated almost all of them.

(Unfortunately, I lost most of my pictures and sketches so I only have the three below. Sorry. 🙁 )

After rejecting about five ideas or so, I finally came up with three I was quite okay with.

Noise Installation

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Cascading Book Pages Installation

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Censorship Book Installation

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Finally after much pondering, I found that I was most passionate about the last concept.

I did a lot of research (Goodreads was a great help) about different banned books from all over the world. Initially I was going to go with something more serious, but after seeing the ridiculous reasons books were getting banned for, I decided to alter my tune.

I came up with a list of possible books I wanted to use for my work and their respective information:

  1. harry potter
  2. hunger games
  3. perks of being a wallflower
  4. his dark materials
  5. looking for alaska
  6. twilight
  7. anne frank
  8. picture of dorian gray
  9. brave new world
  10. the da vinci code
  11. frankenstein
  12. lord of the rings
  13. and tango makes three
  14. leaves of grass
  15. hamlet
  16. fifty shades
  17. lolita
  18. ender’s game
  19. les mis

The place I decided to utilise for my installation is this particular area. I thought the structure was interesting, and I could utilise both the pegs and the pedestal in my work.

location

Initially I wanted to toy with visual imagery but it ended up making the book (and the protagonist) look like they were on a hitlist. So that idea was scrapped.

Initial Test Concept:

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 6.22.56 pm

(Felt a tad bit disrespectful too since she died during WWII in terrible conditions.)

I decided to alter the concept to library cards, as that’s what people used to borrow books before. Most of the books that I mentioned were also explicitly banned by specific libraries in different countries, so I figured this imagery would be cohesive with the entire installation. I obtained this base picture on google, before editing it  to reflect the details of the book.

vintage lib card original

My first test image:

hp

I ended up changing date due to censored for greater clarity.

I also approached the work with a more satirical and sarcastic tone. As someone who is much more on the serious side, this is something I have never really embraced before. It ended up being an extremely interesting process for me as I developed my work.

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