Friday, March 4, 2011

Can a pillowcase be inspirational?

I am doing an elective subject called "Mining the Museum". Now, museums are great fun for someone like me who likes to collect stuff and would love to have their very Victorian Cabinet of Curiousity. There are plenty of contemporary artists out there who are inspired by the stuff in museums and the way it is arranged. Mark Dion springs to mind. If you have time you might like to check him out on YouTube too - you will find him a pretty interesting and energetic kinda guy. So whilst this subject has given me the excuse (who needs one?) to head off to a couple of different museums and listen to some really interesting lectures, so far all I have done is daydream about collections and taxonomy - which is a fancy way of saying "classifying stuff". No harm in that but I am not making much headway with the practical requirements of the course! I feel however, that is all about to change - and I owe it all to a humble pillowcase. You see today I found a single, lonesome pillowcase in the oppie ...


It has all these lovely specimen-like drawings - the sort you might have found in a botanical book. It spoke to me of early pioneers and collectors who painstakingly documented their botanical finds. A few flicks of the scissors and a turn around the trusty Singer and a transformation took place ...


Now it is a lovely A4 size journal cover that seems completely appropriate for the subject at hand. All I have to do is fill it up with clever ruminations, illustrations and some research - easy-peasy! Not! My hope is that this lovely cover will inspire me every time I look at it and the work will just flow - as a theory it has some merit ...

1 comment:

Ro Bruhn said...

Love the pillow case and how you've used it. I visited the V&A museum in London a few years back, that had some wonderful collections, a source of great inspiration