Final term

I'm about to embark on my final term of the course. This term will see me working on my final project, which will be exhibited at the Morley College Gallery from 7th July to the 14th July. There will be 16 of us exhibiting this year – considerably more than the previous year – so it's not clear yet how much space we'll each have available to us.

I'm terrified, of course. I'm afraid of not having anything ready in time, and I'm possibly more afraid of not having anything good ready in time. Sadly, my classmates are all very talented individuals, many of whom already have strong ideas about what they want to say and do in this show.

My final project will, I think, stem from my work on skeletons last term. The title I'm using for my current research is “inner workings exposed” and I'm focusing on the human body, particularly its moving parts. I do feel confident that whatever form my final work takes, it should invite interaction. Viewers should be able to touch it, and ideally they'll need to undo parts and open it out in order to see everything.

One of my classmates suggested I check out Brian Dettmer's artwork, specifically the piece “Gray's Anatomy”, when I brought these ideas up in a class discussion last term. After finding it out online I realised that it had actually been included in the Skin exhibition at the Wellcome Collection last year. Dettmer can talk about his work much better than I can, so here's a presentation he gave for Atlanta Pecha Kucha in 2009.

Brian Dettmer - Remixed Media from Alfredo Aponte on Vimeo.

I'm still puzzled about how he carves the books though. He says in the video that he seals the book and then carves into it without knowing what he'll find. Presumably he can't glue the pages together because then he wouldn't be able to remove individual layers, but how he seals the books isn't revealed. I'd be very interested to see him working on one of these so I can get my head around the process.