Monday, June 6, 2011

Proposal - Lucy Baird

In this class I hope to develop a more cohesive practice and delve back into some of my past projects I hope to explore further. I am hoping to develop a portfolio to leave school with that is cohesive and complete.

I would like to focus on a project I have been working on for about three months now. It is tentatively entitled “The forts project.” I think this project in its production gets to core of what kind of practice I would like to develop. It is research based and was the product of a semesters long exploration of a feeling of alienation from my childhood home as I age.

I began interviewing people about the types of forts they built as children and why they made them. I then distilled this information and used it to build and photograph “forts” or child constructed spaces within adult homes. I enjoyed the process of the research for this project and integrating the personal interviews into my artistic practice. My working statement for the project is below:


This project was inspired by my own explorations into my increasingly complicated relationship with my parents and my childhood home as I age. Specifically a feeling of alienation I currently attach to my childhood home because as an adult it no longer feels like home. In an attempt to understand this feeling I began to consider the role of a child in a parents home. Homes are not meant to be child size; they are built for adults and inhabited in an adult way. Yet children recognize this and often construct their own spaces and dwellings with a home. This is an attempt to safety, privacy, fit and a drive to customize. Children appropriate adult objects and practice when building their own spaces, they construct their own versions of adult spaces yet infuse them with a their own imaginative innocent understanding of the nature of dwellings and habitation. To a child a sheet becomes a roof, a closet a cave, and a couch a fortress.


I think I have made a good start to this project but would like to consider it further and develop it further.

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