For this I was to explore the compositional potential of surfaces and containers and the associated narrative possibility of the objects that inhabit them. I chose a random desk drawer in my flat that I share with my partner. It was a very random set of things indeed! Here is the drawing with the numbers followed by all the information:
- Battery pack for electronic golf caddy that my partner owns. This was a present from his parents for his 40th birthday (4 years ago) to help him avoid hurting his already sore back by carrying around the clubs. He loves to golf though doesn’t always get the chance to. He thinks I should try it, I think it’s boring. When it comes to sports he is so into it just as much as I hate watching any sport on TV and find golf boring. It’s one of the areas we disagree on!
- Practice golf ball with air holes which my partner got from his uncle about 10 years ago. he was the first person to take him out for his first game of gold, taught him and gave him the golf bug. These are not real balls, you can really hit them but they slow easy and they don’t do any damage so they used to do that in the garden.
- Post its which I bought Stef as a wee part of a Christmas stocking two years ago except now I use them for my work as he never does and he teases me about it. I also have stolen the multi-coloured pens I gave hime too.
- 3 prints rolled up together: 2 were paintings of aboriginal art that my partner bought when he went to Australia in 2006 to tour around on an extra long holiday. He has yet to put them up on a wall. Then there was one photo that I took of the Eiffel Tower using an old black and white camera when doing a course a long time ago and gifted him a copy. I was in Paris for work and one night I sneaked off to the Eiffel Tower view point in the rain to take a cool black and white photo with the reflection of the lights on the wet ground below! I made various copies and gave my partner this (at the time we were friends). He was and still is, into photography and prints.
- A Pritt stick that I bought in December 2023 for a workshop I was running.
- A Stapler that was left to my partner by a friend of his called Claudio who stayed every year at Stef’s. This friend kept lots of clothes and things like this at his. He sadly passed away last year and Stef didnt have the heart to throw it out so he kept it.
- An empty polaroid cartridge from a new polaroid camera my partner got me for my birthday last year. I used it at my birthday to take some nice photos with friends and family. I tidied away the cartridge rather than throw it out as I want to check how and if I can recycle it.
- A small case of polaroid lenses for the same camera that I have yet to try out and it has different colours. Looking forward to that!
- Second hand 70’s style glasses my partner bought at a second hand shop in Glasgow to wear to a fancy dress party for my aunt’s 70th. I also have some somewhere and we had a great night!
- A small instruction manual and alan key for a book stand. I bought this on Amazon a couple of months ago for my computer and reading books but it doesn’t resist well to pressure from typing so now we use it to display our cooking book on the page as we follow recipes and cook together and so we keep the books open and clean.
- A hair band with Shrek ears gifted to my partner by a friend when they were going to a fancy dress party years ago. He hates Halloween and so going to a party a friend got him these as a joke as he never dresses up at Halloween. He couldn’t quite remember who!
- Lightbulb: we took out the spotlights above the dining room table as they are too bright according to me so he adjusted them by taking some out. The lights still have to be fixed.
- My partner’s very last walkman he had and clearly doesn’t want to throw out or recycle! He only owned 3 or 4 over time and it’s a legacy of his past as it’s how he first started listening to music and still has a mix tape that goes with it. It came with him when he moved to Scotland from Italy at 18 (a long time ago!)
Everything was packed tight and was not visible so I created a larger ‘drawer’ space on the table so I could arrange them to be seen while still randomly placing them without any order or thought to it.
This was a fun exercise and once I had drawn it and checked the history of the objects belonging to my partner, I started to think of some themes that were coming out of the set of objects to inspire my presentation of them.
- represents things that we both like to do ie take photos, collect art when we travel, cook together and eat together, play sport (though I don’t like golf much to my partners dismay)
- Gifts to each other related to photography (photos, camera and links to how much we like art and right now are choosing what to put on our walls as we moved in together in August 2023 and still are putting things right in the flat
- Shows quite a long history of our connections. From gifts when we first dated 18 years ago for a couple of months but then we stayed friends (Paris photo) to date, after 3 years and 8 months together and him getting me a polaroid camera for my birthday last December. That made me nostalgic! It also made me remember a funny story about when I was doing that photography course, he asked me to do his football team member photos and I did except I had to do them twice as the first time the spool didn’t catch as I was using an old SLR! Embarrassing!
- Reflects somehow building connections and life together now we live together – random things from both of us and things we have yet to put on the walls or remnants of gifts we use. Or it could be how since I have moved in, my life is more strongly becoming entangled with his! He called it a nice box of memories.
- Could be done like a clue list to profile us without knowing the actual details. My partner: golfs and likes other sports, into art and graphics, likes to party and doesn’t mind dressing up and being silly. Me: likes photography and art, is creative and likes to make things. Reads and uses a computer.
- Or it could be made into a kind of crime scene set of clues as part of an investigation!
- I did some research also on Daniel Spoerri and the mentioned book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance and really liked this idea of describing the objects he was capturing with recollections in the moment or in the past. Source:
- Printed Matter, Inc. (no date) An Anecdoted Topography of Chance. Printed Matter, Inc. Available at: https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/10242/ (Accessed 17th September, 2023)
- So it’s a little bit like an auto-biography in some ways and then I found some examples of what the inside of the book was like:
- Thus I decided to make it like a brief autobiography of my partner somehow similar to this style. Though I noted that Spoerri’s illustrations were more sketchy and full rather than just an outline. So I also decided to do a colour version of the table top to try out too, and also turned that into black and white to play around with in In Design:
I brainstormed some ideas on how to do that and reordered the numbers to fit more with the timeline. I tried thinking about the people involved in all of these, potentially using their photos but then decided against for privacy reasons. I then wanted to either use photos to explain the items together with the text to be added that could go around the topography. I tried to think of tracing a story line around the objects on top, almost like a map and then adding a key – inspired by Part 4 final assignment!
I then started to trial things directly in In Design. I made small objects also in colour and black and white to try but then realised this would be too cluttered if I used this with the outline and the text etc. So I started trying to do more of a timeline. I got Stef to find some photos we could use too so I could incorporate these like polaroids!
I went for a more old style typewriter font and tried out colours to match the photo of Stef and I when we first met in 2006! I quite like the pink but also the blue and orange and so I made both fully as two potential options!
Relfections:
- This was a surprising exercise that ended up being a nicely connected one to my partner and myself since I liked the idea of a brief and fun storytelling of our history from the drawer.
- I also quite liked the kind of mapping element to the different objects and it’s quite fun to think of how the history of them could play into the design so much. Random things really came to life in a way I would have never really imagined.
- I clearly like mapping out data and details, this came out even in my previous courses and being able to bring image and creativity to that is something I am becoming more interested in.
Jo's Illustration Learning Blog 