Vaguity
At the beginning of my fourth year on the WAS course at OVADA I was given an additional but very open assignment – ‘Do something in the grey area’. That was it, the grey area being a five metre square windowless room at the end of the studio corridor - a totally blank ‘canvas’ empty of everything including ideas. In previous years a number of my projects had involved a degree of collaboration but always on a one-to-one basis. My ambition was to extend this way of working to involve more people and so I floated the idea to my fellow course members. To my surprise and delight the idea seemed to have an appeal and in spite of the haziness of the proposal they all wanted to be involved. Meanwhile, after a few weeks, plans for the ‘grey area’ changed and the group collaboration shifted to the much larger and more challenging main OVADA space. Ideas remained vague but a final exhibition date was fixed. Over the following weeks and months a number of ideas emerged with all course members involved at every stage. What eventually resulted was a set of nine projects each involving nine people all prepared, at least for a while, to submerge their individual egos into one group identity. None of the work was individually credited. The video gives an impression of the Vaguity show but I believe that the real centre of the project was in the group ethos and in the doing. |