FLOW
My proposal is to use the Pen Museum, Birmingham as an investigative site for the production of new works that build on ideas initiated in the work entitled ‘Cut’ (shown at the Vaults, Birmingham, 2010); ideas relating to the sculptural act of cutting as a means to form, to splice, to bring back together, to make new meanings. I am interested in the action of the machinery in the Pen museum, an action that cuts apart, cuts to allow/enable flow: flow of ink, flow of ideas, flow of communication and of exchange.
To write and to commit to paper provides some sense of the definite, the fixed, but also introduces the impossible attempt to record all aspects of an essentially, ungraspable life experience. I am interested in the tension between the fixed and the flexible; the cut and the flow.
At a time of high precarity, with a move since the 70’s towards greater instability in the workplace, it’s an opportune time to revisit and respond to the predictability and security of the repetitive labour involved in the pen nib manufacturing process; the real ‘product’ of which was the immaterial development of education and literacy throughout the world. The brutal, mechanical act of cutting, then, becomes the act through which change, exchange and understanding occurs. This project would explore the materiality of this process, how it forms and informs our changing relationship to the world. The repetition of redundancy (as both a precursor and successor of change), frames this process; from the redundant Sheffield plate workers who migrated to Birmingham to the redundancy of labour/of object and of process; and as such the implied latency of this situation interests me too -the inevitability of this site/archive, revisited, to provide new readings and meanings.
The historical function of the steel nibs to create both text and image lends itself to an investigation of the interplay of these aspects in (contemporary) fine art practice and so I intend to respond to this site by creating a series of installed works incorporating text, image and object that will exist across both sites (Pen Museum and Old Science Museum) to enable and encourage the unconstrained flow of audience and meanings between spatially interrupted works.
j.ball@coventry.ac.uk 1/10/2010
Jane Ball is based in Coventry and works in sculptural installation, interested in time as a fluid process, change and transformation through material process working with everyday objects, and reinterpreting history in the present.
FLOW
My proposal is to use the Pen Museum, Birmingham as an investigative site for the production of new works that build on ideas initiated in the work entitled ‘Cut’ (shown at the Vaults, Birmingham, 2010); ideas relating to the sculptural act of cutting as a means to form, to splice, to bring back together, to make new meanings. I am interested in the action of the machinery in the Pen museum, an action that cuts apart, cuts to allow/enable flow: flow of ink, flow of ideas, flow of communication and of exchange.
To write and to commit to paper provides some sense of the definite, the fixed, but also introduces the impossible attempt to record all aspects of an essentially, ungraspable life experience. I am interested in the tension between the fixed and the flexible; the cut and the flow.
At a time of high precarity, with a move since the 70’s towards greater instability in the workplace, it’s an opportune time to revisit and respond to the predictability and security of the repetitive labour involved in the pen nib manufacturing process; the real ‘product’ of which was the immaterial development of education and literacy throughout the world. The brutal, mechanical act of cutting, then, becomes the act through which change, exchange and understanding occurs. This project would explore the materiality of this process, how it forms and informs our changing relationship to the world. The repetition of redundancy (as both a precursor and successor of change), frames this process; from the redundant Sheffield plate workers who migrated to Birmingham to the redundancy of labour/of object and of process; and as such the implied latency of this situation interests me too -the inevitability of this site/archive, revisited, to provide new readings and meanings.
The historical function of the steel nibs to create both text and image lends itself to an investigation of the interplay of these aspects in (contemporary) fine art practice and so I intend to respond to this site by creating a series of installed works incorporating text, image and object that will exist across both sites (Pen Museum and Old Science Museum) to enable and encourage the unconstrained flow of audience and meanings between spatially interrupted works.
j.ball@coventry.ac.uk 1/10/2010
Jane Ball is based in Coventry and works in sculptural installation, interested in time as a fluid process, change and transformation through material process working with everyday objects, and reinterpreting history in the present.