INSTALLATION / IMMERSION
Project duration: 20 11 20 - 20 12 14
What are the contextual attributes and agencies that construct our spatial experience? How do they affect our sense of spatial presence? Can we question/change the nature of our presence by transforming the spatial attributes? Can we forge a new spatiality by understanding design as a tool, enabling and affording new experiences? How can we modulate/transform spatial agencies? Can we dislocate ourselves from a space, its context, through spatial effects? Can we immerse into an experience that is unfamiliar, strange, and surreal and so on?
The bathtub is a space of reflection and ritual. Being a place of thought, the intention of this installation is to create a routine of reflection, acknowledgment, and storage of memory. Hung are pages of old journals, notes, and other memories kept in the form of pen and paper. Sheets are selected, reflected upon, and thoughtfully dissolved in water. At the end of the bath, the fibre is caught in a screen and dried, creating a new sheet of paper. This process of paper making is parallel to that of the bathing routine, as well as creates a conscious ritual of something done more often unconsciously, that being the storage of memory. Full events or days are not remembered vividly, but rather bits and pieces, just as bits and pieces of the original sheets are visible within the new. It is important that we do not forget past memories, and as difficult as revisiting them can be, this process emphasizes an acknowledgment and acceptance, allowing room for the new.
Knots, and their undoing, were explored as symbols of memory, particularly those of stress. This line of inquiry into unwinding led to the exploration of softening the space using steam to create a comforting enclosure. Both of these inquiries revealed the importance of water in the phenomenological relationship to the space.
In exploring water as the catalyst to reflection and relaxation, the process of paper making was revealed to be parallel to that of a typical bathing ritual, simplified as soaking, washing, and drying.
Sheets of old journals and notes were suspended, reflected on, then dissolved. At the end of the bath the paper pulp was collected in a screen and dried, creating a collective sheet.
The final sheet of paper reveals bits and pieces of the originals, much like our memory is fragmented and incomplete. This exercise invited a conscious acknowledgment of the past, and an acceptance of moving forward.
