A YEAH One Off Piece. Updated.

This piece is a personal collaboration with YEAH Magazine, and will form the practical resolution for my final year degree project.

In line with YEAH, the piece will be theme based, in this case, exploring peoples responses to their favourite children’s book. I have been asking contributors to respond; in whatever manner they choose, to a book from their childhood. I have asked them to think about what memories they have of the book, how it made and still makes them feel, and what it means to them.

Although it is a magazine collaboration project, I am reluctant to call it a magazine. The final format is still a work in progress at this stage, originally I envisaged it sitting somewhere between a magazine and an artists book. However, the more the project progresses, the more reluctant I am to bind it.

In a project so heavily built around the concept of childhood, I thought it important to ask people what childhood means to them. The response I got built up a picture of childhood as a time when there is nothing to worry about, when you are free, with no cares or worries. It’s exciting and beautiful, a time for innocence and adventure. It’s about exploring, interacting and learning.

I want these elements to be reflected in my piece. I have begun to think that to bind this project, to give it a rigid ‘magazine’ form, would limit the adventure. The reader wouldn’t get enough of a sense of exploration and excitement.

From the projects I have been researching, I have decided that I want the readers or viewers of this piece to be able to interact with what they see. They need to feel it, smell it and most importantly, experience it.

The way my ideas are going at the moment, the piece may take the form of a sort of ‘box of goodies’. As a child myself, I would collect things in a shoebox. I collected letters, photographs, shells, leaves, and pretty much anything else I found and was fascinated by.

Maybe the piece will be a box crammed full of postcard images, miniature books, toys and things to evoke memories.

At the moment I am still gathering contributions, and beginning to piece them together. One of the biggest issues I face is authorship. This seems to be a recurring theme in a lot of my projects recently.

On a photography course, where my projects include no photographs of my own. Where do I stand? How do I make the work my own?

I have thought about including my own photographs in this piece. To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to. Somehow, I don’t think it fits, I don’t think it would be right.

I think this is a curation piece, about how I bring together the work I have collected, commissioned or sourced. My work is to curate, to bring together and to present the work.

So, that’s where I am at the moment. Who knows where it will end. My only constraint is time, the downfall of it being tied to my degree.