A series of three further FaceTime meetings have enabled progress and project development with research shared, ideas trialled and decisions made.
Research around thematic mapping and the direction of our back gardens has offered a methodology to make use of. Lists of actions undertaken within each section of our gardens have been produced and shared. Common actions undertaken in both gardens within the same grid reference have been identified and first visual interpretations of these considered. Book formats have been trialled by P and shared. Scale of working has been agreed and final decisions around page content are being resolved through making.
The shared stories of our back gardens are emerging by employing a systematic approach to the documentation of common content.
Two further FaceTime meetings have afforded time to think, share ideas, and discuss questions arising around preferred media, methodology and process in order to continue to do things differently.
Meeting three: Having taken some time to explore the potential of common-placed trees within our respective back gardens, this meeting allowed first ideas and questions arising to be shared. Thoughts about the use of blocks of colour, collage, and simplified forms representing actions taking place within each location were presented alongside notions of interchanging sections of our gardens together in some way. Maintaining our interest in doing things differently in subsequent projects, we discussed a series of questions raised by P around choice of media, methodology and possible processes. The phrase round and round the garden resonated with both of us offering an opportunity to somehow make use of being right and left handed respectively. We considered dividing the garden grids into left hand and right hand side pages which we might respond to sequentially or individually and agreed to post our memory drawings to each other to trial these ideas further
Meeting four: Continuing to talk about being right and left handed, we explored ideas around each responding only to the left (verso / back ) or right (recto / front ) sides of book pages which offered an approach around how to combine our gardens within one response. Alongside this, P also shared the artistic practice of Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp’s whose approach to collaboration employs elements of collage added in layers. Referencing these ideas, P outlined an approach for this project in which we respond to one half of the grid each (left and right) with numbers of coloured shapes informed by the grid reference. These will be posted to each other to add some element of visual imagery linked to the activity undertaken within that section of the garden. Ideas around the scale and shape of book were discussed and P agreed to explore a series of book formats to share next week.
meeting in the middle 