John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

Some of them there were different dialogues there so ‘What’s Cooking
Grandma?’ was a very particular dialogue because they came to Lancaster to do
their production etc. So the conversations were always ongoing. Other pieces
we didn’t know at all what they were going to be like until they arrived. Maybe
that’s not a bad thing maybe it’s that element of process, by the time we got to
the end of the run of the show I felt if this was folly Gallery now we would like to
do is start introducing more pieces of work into this and take some of them
away and start this shifting process where you get themes starting to build up
and merge and pull away. After three weeks I was still very happy with the way
things felt I didn’t want to be shot of the show I felt that it could start to evolve
with more processes being introduced.
14. In your opinion, what was the strongest work in the exhibition
and why?
I was very happy with the overall quality of the show and I think that the works
themselves all maintained a good level plane. In terms of the power of a piece of
work I particularly liked the ‘Morse’ code installation in the middle. That spiral
of plaster forms that for me was the fulcrum of the whole thing everything was
spinning off that. I know when you get down to the basics of what that piece of
work was about in terms of the off/on, zero-one, switches etc. which is all about
the way that technology actually works. If you want to pull it down to basics it’s
just about dots and dashes. I like the way it felt, I liked the way the lighting
conditions in there particularly it came through quite a busy space. To start of
within the first part of the show you’ve got a quite quiet, reflective contemplative
piece in the middle. I always liked coming into that space and I know that we
spelt some aspects of it wrong or Justin spelt some aspects of it were wrong and
it took a member of our audience to spot it. It became much stronger in the
whole scheme of things because its placement or perhaps its spiral configuration
which was something which came out of dialogue between the curatorial
partners and the artists. I know that Justin wasn’t the most convinced by that.
I liked the way that worked I liked how that felt it had a decompression feeling
to it. Other things felt different, there were different feelings to things and I just
liked the way you could move around that it held its own and considering how it
was originally supposed to be installed it wouldn’t have registered on the
Richter scale in terms of its impact. That was my favourite piece.
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