Putting Personal Texts into public space: Projects
by Debbie Harman Qadri
This is one of two documents that I submitted for my masters of Fine Arts ( Art in Public Space). This document outlines the major projects that I completed in my research.
Our public space is saturated with advertising and signage, which seem to have an authentic place and validity.
All around us are signs telling us where to go and what to do
and advertising that shows us how we should look,
and what we should desire.
and what we should desire.
There seems to be no place for a personal voice.
How can we insert text into public space?
Permanent, ephemeral, permissioned and
Un-permissioned,
Debbie undertakes a series of projects that explore methods of making and placing personal texts into public space
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Debbie Qadri undertook this research
As part of her Master of Arts (Art in Public Space)
S3351063 June 2014
Debbie Qadri is also known as Debbie Harman
And Debbie Harman Qadri
© by the author of this book. The book author retains sole copyright to his or her contributions to this book.
All photographs are by Debbie Qadri unless otherwise specified.
Copyright Debbie Qadri 2014
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Introduction
This book features projects by Debbie Harman Qadri which explore ways that personal text can be placed in public space. It is a series of artworks in response to an environment which is becoming more and more regulated in a way that excludes individuals from making personal text in public space. Laws that regulate what we can place in public space which have developed as a response to graffiti also create a culture where the expression of individual thought and ideas is seen as not belonging in the spaces we share. It has created a cultural norm that it’s inappropriate to place a personal text in public space.
For this research methods of placing text in public space in a variety of mediums and installation methods were explored. These activities led to the involvement of community participants in making personal texts for the spaces that they inhabit, exploring ideas of personal expression and ownership of public spaces. Through the practice of creating these events and artworks a new dialogue or text is created, that explores the place of personal text in public space.
This book showcases some of the projects produced during this research.
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Contents
Introduction
Contents
List of featured Projects
Filling the cracks with conversation
Moving letters and words for participatory projects
· Ceramic letters
· The clothesline timeline
· Stencil the street workshop
Moonambel Poets
Sages of Sunshine
Shelton Lea was here
Sunshine babel onion
Faith to faith
Highlights from other projects
About the artist
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| Peg Poetry, Lauderdale, Tasmania 2014 |
‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
Filling the cracks with conversation
Ceramic tiles, all purpose silicon, and blog.
Fringe Festival, September 2012 and ongoing installations.
http://fillingthecrackswithconversation.wordpress.com/
It’s a normal part of Melbournian life to insert little pieces of conversation wherever you can. Speaking to anyone and everyone, we generally love to chatter and to wish each other well. Have a look and you’ll see that the cracks are being filled with light-hearted conversation.
Filling the Cracks with Conversation is an intervention project where personal greetings that people use in everyday encounters were written on ceramic tiles and then inserted into cracks in pavements.
This project was launched as part of the 2012 Melbourne Fringe Festival, and over 21 days conversations were placed in different areas of the city of Melbourne and its western suburbs. Each day about ten conversations were installed. Photographs were taken which documented the artwork and the place of installation and then blogged on the website. The project blog was advertised through the Fringe Festival program guide so it could be viewed via the photographs or by going to the actual sites and encountering the tiles.
I received a very positive response from this project, via comments, digital media responses and by repeatedly coming across people who recalled seeing the conversations. Beyond the festival the project has continued when requests or opportunities arise. Two council arts officers quietly asked me to do the project in particular places - an indication that they thought the project was worthwhile. The positive aspect of the conversational texts seems to have been one of the reasons for its success. It’s hard to argue with something that is giving you a pleasant message. The messages echo the voices that you hear each day when you speak to people in the street. The ceramic conversations affirmed and reminded us that there is a verbal text (one of conversations) occurring daily in our streets. Besides all of the written text of advertising and signage, there exists in opposition, an ongoing text of conversations, (however light, shallow and non invasive) bringing human intervention of text into public space.
Filling the cracks is also a performance. A lonely and sometimes private performance by the artist when inserting the conversations, but also a performance that is re-imagined by the audience. The audience imagines the artist gluing the ceramic piece into the cracks. They wonder who would do that and why? How are the tiles made and installed? Can I lever it out and take it home? When an enquiry is made about the artwork it is often about the performance. Why are you doing this? Rosa Goldberg* suggests that ‘performance has always been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relationship to culture.' The tiles and the blog are evidence and constant reminders of the artist’s performance of placing a personal text in public space. The audience is compelled to ask themselves why it is so interesting an unusual to see the text in public space. Who put it here and why? Other responses to the artwork suggest it is the sense of play and the small transgression of being placed without permission that makes the work enjoyable and contemplative.
The project diminishes as people steal away the tiles and grows as others photograph the conversations and speak about the project. But it is renewed by new installations and by the ongoing conversations about the work. Gradually the work is becoming more known and resonant.
So the project has more than one mode of existence. It is firstly a performance of placing text into public space without permission. The artwork functions a second time as a prop for the audience to imagine the artist installing the text, where they think about the implications of placing the text in public space. A third aspect is when the artwork becomes a conversation, in its real form and as a series of photographs it promotes discussion about the placement of text in public space. As Filling the Cracks with Conversation exists in a variety of forms and produces a conversation it has itself become a text.
Filling the cracks with conversation has continued to be installed. A new series of conversations have been made in different languages. This continual reiteration of the placing of text in public space makes the project durational and long term so that the audience and the discursive text can grow.
* Goldberg, R, 1979 , Performance - live art 1909 to the present,
Thames and Hudson, Great Britain.
Thames and Hudson, Great Britain.
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Moving letters and words for Participatory Projects
Very early in this research the possibilities of working with communities evolved as a natural step so that individuals could write their own words in their own public spaces. When you hand over the writing to the inhabitants of the place the writing takes on increased significance. Placing the personal text of community members into their own public spaces is a very powerful mechanism. Not only will the participants see their own work in their place, but also it is public and so their friends, family and strangers will also see it.
Often people are reluctant to write in public space. Writing without a purpose and in and for a public space was unfamiliar and daunting for most participants. The process was more successful when it engaged people with unusual materials and with a sense of play. When using ceramic letters, cutting out paper or fabric letters, or using pegs, the act of handling the new materials makes the process more engaging. The physical act of arranging the letters to make words and the textures of the letters in the hands and the sound of the ceramic letters whilst moving them to search through them, made the activity tactile and physical.
CERAMIC LETTERS
I begun to build up a collection of ceramic letters and decided that this could be used at a festival for participants to write with. The idea was for participants to make temporary arrangements, which would be photographed, and blogged. This was done with Gallery Sunshine Everywhere at the Brimbank Festival in 2012 and 2013 and in many other situations including concrete poetry workshops with school children
PLASTIC – The Clothesline Timeline
In late 2012 I was commissioned to make The Clothesline Timeline, which was an ephemeral artwork for the Djeriwarrh Festival (City of Melton). A twenty metre long clothesline was set up with plastic garments on it. Participants were asked to think about where they come from, who they are and where are they going in light of the city of Melton’s 150th anniversary. Using fabric or paper participants cut out and taped letters onto the garments which were rehung on the line.
As usual, most participants were intent on writing their names and the physical act of choosing the item of clothing, pulling it down off the line, cutting and taping the letters on the work and then rehanging it, made the participant a part of the artwork as a performance piece.
Photographs: ‘The Clothesline Timeline’, Debbie Qadri with Nick Hackett and Mary Hackett, Djerriwarhh Festival, Commissioned by Melton Council, 2012
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Peg Poetry
The peg poetry is a performance of the artworks. The pegs are temporary, and they can be moved arranged or removed by the audience. To engage the viewer into playing with the artwork, they were made bright and colourful. They are familiar and yet new in their guise as artworks. Made out of household materials, and sometimes housed on a bright structure of garden mesh, plastic bags, string, yarns and cottons and pegs but bearing words.
The origins of concrete poetry in the Dada movement, situated writing as a playful activity but also underlined with anarchic intent. The Dadaists were concerned with spontaneity, automatic writing and chance. Concrete poetry is often discovered by children in primary school and enjoyed because of its lack of rules and its sense of play. The physical movement of the letters away from the linear and horizontal norm, discards grammar and throws the reader off merely reading the text for its meaning, they are instead forced to look at it for its visual meaning and the why of its difference from other texts and perhaps the joy of discovering unusual juxtapositions and meanings. Misspelling and grammatical mistakes transgress against pre-conceived notions of what writing is. The writing that evolves from the activity of writing with the constraints of physically making, finding or arranging letters and words has also resulted in a more oral language and idiom. It has created a halfway place, where it has been a celebration to write the text incorrectly.
This ludic writing producing aimless or accidental, chance words and phrases is the opposite of the text we find in public space, which is either didactic or persuasive. And a person using their hands instead of a computer has obviously made it. The ability of these artworks to sit locally and be played with by locals allows them to be authentic voices for local inhabitants and community owners of the place.
Blogging
Blogging the texts that participants made became a method of engaging people in the project and providing a deeper link and longer relationship with the artwork. Having a photograph of their artwork on the blog was similar to having their writing published. Participants were given a small card, which listed the blog address on it. In this way they were encouraged to think about their text as an important contribution the world of literature.
Their arrangement of words and letters was valued and had become permanent as a photograph. Their text had been captured in time, and would be shared with others. Naturally the participants were attracted to the idea of keeping the physical artwork, but were consoled with the idea that the actual making and the memory (the photograph) of the artwork were just as useful as the artefact.
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The Moonambel Poets
http://moonambelpoets.wordpress.com/
I have had an ongoing relationship with the town of Moonambel in north-western Victoria, being involved in three public artworks and many exhibitions. I approached the Moonambel Art and History Group (MAGH) with the offer that I could run workshops to make ceramic text and then install them on a local fence. If the community were offered this opportunity how would they take it up?
The response became one of the best examples of personal text in public space evolving from this research. Although the MAHG committee set the theme of “Men’s business” to match the theme of their annual exhibition, each poet (community member) approached their writing in a very personal way, often referring to the significant men in their lives and the important aspects of the relationship.
The community also took the opportunity to drum up media attention and invite people from surrounding towns to the workshop. A one-day workshop was held at the recreation centre to make the ceramic poetry and seventeen people came to this workshop. Another evening was spent installing the work at the Moonambel Common. An opening was organised by the group for two days later where the mayor of the Pyrenees opened the show.
The project was an experiment with what can happen when you get a community involved in placing their own text in public space. In this case the community took ownership of the project and created some very personal responses. It was a great project to be involved in and still remains today on the fence at the Moonambel Common. It was definitely an early lesson in the potential value of getting a community involved in making text for their own space.
Sages of Sunshine
Amongst the shops and buildings around City Place and Sun Crescent, a little collection of artworks about local sages and their wisdom can be found. The artworks are tiles, which feature hand drawn portraits of locals and some of their wisdom.
The Sages of Sunshine is a series of portraits of local shopkeepers and residents accompanied by words of wisdom. It is an instance of personal text written by local inhabitants, and placed in this space. The project places an importance on the words that locals have spoken, the people themselves and the place. The hand painted tiles and hand written text contrast against the other texts in the area, which are impersonal, instructive or economically driven.
The portraits are painted onto bisque tiles with underglazes and fired. They were painted onsite in City Place and Sun Avenue an area becoming known as the Sunshine Arts Precinct. As I sat on a bench painting a scene, sometimes people would chat to me, or I would ask people if I could paint their portrait. The painted tiles were then glazed and fired in the kiln. After being mounted onto a piece of marine ply they returned to the place to be installed. Through this process the personal voice of the portrait subject is included in the artwork and the artworks also evolve from the space where they would be installed. The project is an important one for the suburb as if confers local voices into the place. The artist only acts as a conduit to achieve this authentic local text.
The portraits and scenes also reflect an aesthetic of the hand-made, hand drawn and hand written, as opposed to the digitally printed text and images in the area.
The length that the project would remain installed was not known. It has mainly stayed intact. The installation of about fifteen tiles was completed in December 2013 and to date only four have been removed. One of the tiles, which had come off its plywood mount, was returned to the Sunshine Art spaces studio, indicating that locals valued the project enough to return the tile to the art spaces. Most of the artwork has not been damaged or removed, which is a good indication that the community accepts and values the artwork.
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Shelton Lea was here.
Debbie Qadri with Mary Buchanan Bailey 2013
Shelton Lea was a project that arose out of the idea that someone was here and now is gone but not forgotten. The idea of someone writing ‘ . . . .was here’, also naturally infers graffiti text, and also the idea of wanting to be remembered or placing your name in a place as a moment for others to acknowledge your own existence.
Shelton Lea was a poet of the seventies written and spoken word movement of Melbourne, and is fondly remembered by many. I thought I would do this project as a conversation with the people that remember Shelton Lea. In Melbourne poetry is not a mainstream culture and poetry is hardly studied in schools now, so this project is a small way of keeping a conversation going about his work and his contribution to poetry writing and spoken word in Melbourne. His work influenced a whole generation of readers and writers.
Shelton Lea passed away in 2005 so ‘Shelton lea was here’, not only references a common graffiti phrase, but also refers to the fact that he was at the places where the text is installed, and that ironically he is not here now. The artwork begs the question, ‘who did that and why? Who is Shelton Lea (for those who don’t know) and for those that do know who Shelton Lea is, it becomes the act of remembering him and his work. The artwork is the conduit towards a conversation about why the text is there and also thinking about a life that was here.
Sunshine Babel Onion
A participatory and durational installation over one month at Sunshine Art Spaces, Sunshine, November 2012. Plastic, acrylic paint and mixed media (with support from Brimbank Council’s sunshine Art Spaces Project)http://sunshinebabelonion.wordpress.com/,
Sunshine Babel Onion was an installation at Sunshine Art spaces Studio that was gradually constructed over three weeks by myself and local participants. It was an opportunity to explore materials, community involvement and ways of making text. The Sunshine Art Spaces Studio was offered for a month and so it proved to be an ideal opportunity to try out an idea I had been thinking about. The open space in the studio facilitated the hanging of large sheets of recycled plastic to make a maze of curtains, creating a multilayered artwork that could be seen through and walked through. Sunlight, movement and the changing position of the spectator, created different views as you walked through or past the installation.
The real challenge of this artwork was how to get the local community and pedestrian traffic involved. Each day, three or four people entered the area and added to the installation. Young people and graffiti artists were especially attracted to the project and liked to make their tags with paint though they often enquired whether their were permanent markers to use. Most people did not want to engage with the artwork in any depth they saw it primarily as a surface on which to write their name.
The artwork evolved over days as a cacophony of text and images, with the aesthetic controlled by having limited materials available - magazines, red, black and white acrylic paint, lead pencil, ballpoint pen, coloured paper, scissors and clear tape. Offcuts from laminating were also used, which offered a different type of clear plastic surface; more clearly seen through and a surface that could be drawn on with ballpoint pen and pencil.
Every couple of days the installation grew with the addition of new sheets of plastic.
The project was documented on a blog after each day of additions. At the end of the project a film was also made of the progress of the artwork.
https://sunshinebabelonion.wordpress.com/
http://sunshine.starcommunity.com.au/star/2012-11-27/an-onion-for-all-2/
Faith to Faith
Faith to Faith Exhibition at Sunshine Art Spaces Gallery, ‘What does Faith mean to you”, stoneware ceramic letters silicone to front window. February 2013. Excerpts of text collected via interviews about “What does faith mean to you”, are installed on the gallery window.
Faith to Faith was an exhibition organized by the Interfaith Committee and Brimbank Council. The exhibition criteria was to explore the idea of Faith. I submitted a proposal to interview locals about what the word ‘Faith’, means to them and to make the common themes into a concrete poem on the gallery window using ceramic text.
The artwork is based on a series of answers to the question – what does ‘faith’ mean to you.
The text uses the most common words and phrases that arose in the interviews with people about the word faith. Thus creating a concrete representation of the commonalities of people’s relationship with the word ‘Faith’. Inside the gallery there was an audio collage of some of the interviews that you could listen to with a cd player and headphones.
The technique of gluing ceramic tiles to the window and the removal was first trialed on the Sunshine Art Studios window.
Above: ‘What does Faith mean to you?’
Stoneware ceramic and silicon on window
Sunshine Art Spaces Gallery,
Sunshine 2013
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Stencil the Street workshop
Stencil the Street workshop, The Brimbank Readers and Writers Festival. September 2013, commission Brimbank Council.
http://concretepoetrymadness.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/stencil-the-street-workshop-for-the-brimbank-readers-and-writers-festival/
The Stencil the Street workshop was developed with Toni Burton (Brimbank Council Art Officer) and Michael Conroy. It was a participatory workshop in City Place and Sun Avenue on the footpaths outside the Sunshine Art Spaces Studios in Sunshine. We used cardboard stencils of letters and patterns and temporary builders spray. The workshop was so popular that it only took about an hour to use up about ten spray-cans of paint that we had. There was a constant lineup to have a go and at the end we were running out of space. Young people, especially loved the opportunity to write onto the street and again they mainly wrote their names or nicknames. A couple of people wrote words of wisdom.
Other projects
Some glimpses of other projects from the research
Debbie Harman Qadri lives and makes artwork in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. She facilitates art projects in schools and communities with an emphasis on the artwork being made by community members. This book features some of the projects from her research into placing personal texts in public space.
More details of these artworks can be found on the following websites:
http://concretepoetrymadness.wordpress.com/
http://fillingthecrackswithconversation.wordpress.com/
http://sagesofsunshine.wordpress.com/
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