just going to toss a little notice that some of you might find my explanations a little daunting but I promise im ok 😉 I didn’t want to go into too much detail but I hope this gets the meaning of my project across more.
looking into my personal history with Nottingham and how I find it living here, in a sense I’ve sort of felt restricted to living here. my upbringing in this city and in my neighbourhood was rough in a way that we constantly struggled as a family with a bunch of life changing situations. we’ve faced a lot of hardships and challenges, some that even to this day we still face and we cant just move away from the problem because we have to stay in Nottingham to settle it, so its put us in a place where we view Nottingham in a not so positive view because we feel tied to it. we know it would be a nice city to live in if our circumstances were different, but Nottingham is a reminder of all the unfortunate things that’s occurred. So the meaning behind this project is quite darkening when you know the context behind it. And my aim really is to try interpret that visually but in a more lightening way to not give the meaning away so obviously without the context, which I think I have done so far.
I’ll talk about the meaning in choice of the materials I chose to develop with first before I explain further with the process. So because of the restricted feelings I have to Nottingham, I decided to use a material that I think could link to restraint and that was wire. When I think of wire as a material, I think of wire mess fences and barbed wire, which both have a purpose of keeping things in or out. The wire I’ve been using is a metal aluminium wire, metal is a strong and usually heavy material, so I wanted to depict that and use wire as a visual way to place my views on Nottingham and what the effects the area has had on me and my family.
Moving onto the process of using a hand sewing technique. there’s something about hand sewing that to me gives whatever it is you’re making, more meaning. When hand sewing, a lot of consideration and patience has to go into it when you’re doing it. Patience and consideration are things I’ve always had to think about and skills I developed whilst growing up as a kid. was sewing my map I came across some difficulties and worked around them, and there were moments where I felt annoyed with what I was doing. And when I think about the process of me developing the sewn map, I was thinking that the process in short is how I could explain my thoughts from my upbringing at that time in less detail.
I actually noted down some of my thoughts whilst doing my map, these are shown in the image below. I rewrote them because the original notes were a mess.
you could say that the map outcome is a relation to my outcome as a person. visibly its an interesting piece but also confusing to look at. my thoughts have gone into the making of the work and i would say that its a small extracted part of me that I’ve created from my views and thoughts on my personal history with Nottingham and how I’ve dealt with it.
i hope this give more of an explanation to my work, it was kind of hard to think about and word it in a way you could understand without making it confusing.
Courtney Blair Art 