Personality (detail) Copyright Susannah Bolton 2011

Thursday

Things I've Been Looking At Recently

Jean Tinguely -
-
-

Very Small Objects -
-


-
My tutor David Fusco told me about VSO after watching me arrange my shells like this -
-
-
Is it not fantastic to have a system for naming and recording hoarded fragments? It reminds of the scene in Everything is Illuminated where the old lady has hundreds of labelled boxes, one of which is labelled "dust".
He also showed me these Caddis Fly sculptures by Hubert Duprat -
-

caddisfly-jewelry-2.png



-
I think that it's very interesting to have thought of taking some creature which scavenges and uses only what it can find to build a home and putting it suddenly in an environment where it can have expensive, glittering materials instead of twigs and debris. It makes me wonder what it would be like to surround people in slum dwellings with valuable building materials to replace their corrugated tin and timber rafter homes. 
-
www.vonglitschka.com.jpg

-
What if they found corrugated gold? What if their reused timber was polished mahogany? What if their scavenged rope washing line was pure hand-spun silk? 
-sb

Monday

First day

First day of art school today - UAL's foundation course in Camberwell.
We had a project called "Cheap Date" - to break the ice and get us started drawing things.
There were 10 locations to visit and record in some way - only got to about 3!
En route, you purchase your "date" a £1.00 gift, which goes to form part of an installation back in college.
I was paired up to a guy who admitted stealing golf balls when he was six, then putting them back through guilt!
Here's a few shots of our Cheap Date installation - gifts were a honeydew melon, an Aladdin video and some caffeine pills (I haven't got any shots of the video case with the crushed caffeine on) - also sorry for the bad quality - these were all taken on my phone because I didn't take my camera (not a mistake I'm making again!) -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I also took these photos once I got home with just the video tape that I'd cut into -
-
-
-
-
Credit to Alex Wood for being my "date" and collaborator for this little project.
Let's see what tomorrow brings...
-sb

Sunday

Personality

I was thinking about meeting all the new people in halls and at college tomorrow - what do I say? Is my name Susannah or Susie? Am I English from Scotland or Scottish with English parents or simply British? Which accent do I use?
How much do we make up or gloss over when we meet people? Are we true to our real selves or does that just come with time? 
I made this using the photo I handed in for my student ID and an old Moleskine notebook - 
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Each cutout shape is almost imperceptibly different from the previous - each day we know a person our knowledge of their identity changes as we learn about them or as they change as people. It often goes unnoticed until, upon reflection, we realise that the person we met isn't quite the person we know.
I then stuck all of the cutouts, including the original cutout from a photo booth photo onto my sketchbook for college tomorrow.
Seeing all of the cutouts together also highlights the progression of outline - 
-
-
-
-
-

-
And the three spares on the inside cover -
Personality - the pattern of collective character, behavioral, temperamental, emotional, and mental traits of a person -
-sb