Julia Woodmore - Portfolio > Thesis > Cardboard City/Racing Green

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Thinking Outside of the Box

Cardboard City/Racing Green

My initial thoughts about the cardboard had led me to automatically associate it with packaging, recycling and 'boxes'. Further investigations concerning this medium alongside my research at SBG led me to start associating it with plights such as homelessness (this plays a major role in the community around SBG), so again perhaps a very obvious link, but herein was the fact - these former applications and representations were playing a role in the development of my project if not predicting the next move I would take. It had already travelled this journey through its own development and in the way it had been used prior to me working with it.

As well as the associations I had already made with the cultural climate of SBG the cardboard also came to represent environmental aspects that affected the area. It gave me a sense of the natural environment making me question the hostilities SBG faced - a primary factor being the pollution from fumes of the cars that circled the green, but these new associations were not born from an affiliation with a subject or an issue that I had previously associated with cardboard. So at this point was the material still influencing the decisions I was making? Perhaps we need to look at a different avenue of thought here and take a step further back into the life of this material to understand this idea fully.

Cardboard is made from wood pulp so it is obvious that it began life as a tree - which type is not relevant and whilst I do not necessarily associate cardboard with trees I can understand that the connection I made with the environment plays an important role here.

I also believe that these ideas could be linked to the feelings I got from physically working with it - a 'bodily reaction'. These connotations were inherently linked to how I interacted with the material.

My personal material and tactile engagement with the cardboard (touch, smell, and sound etc.) were revealing a whole host of possibilities of use. I could see new ways of working with it but I still referred to the representations, the symbolic currency that it evoked. Ultimately these representations were very important and mediated use greatly but representations change in order to uphold the norm. There is a core of stability because the material (to all intent and purposes) stays the same - but there is also flux (it is more fluid) because there is a personal engagement with the medium. So whilst practises may be repeated, the results will always be different (they wont be precisely the same).

To summarise so far we have four main levels of interaction with a material. Firstly, we have the associations to the artwork itself with reference to a wide variety of external factors i.e. nature / culture / site specificity etc.- (whatever the artists concerns might be). Secondly, our reactions to the material of the artwork in question - how sight, touch, sound etc. might influence a response. Thirdly, there is the relationship concerning the former applications of it, keeping in mind that these can change due to the nature of representation. Finally, we have our response to its actual physiology, what it was in its most basic form (i.e. trees to cardboard). The nature (texture, form) of the material changes but it is still fundamentally the same material¹. At this point I want to make it clear that I am looking at this in terms of creator, but naturally each of these points raised apply equally to that of the audiences experiences. This something I will be exploring through my own role as 'audience' in the final case study.

Not only was I happy working with the cardboard because of its 'associative' qualities (realised or not at the time), but because I wanted to see if I could change our existing relationship to it by bringing in the question, 'is this in fact cardboard?'. The use of dye and varnish on my project created the illusion that the cardboard was in fact wood. I had changed the associations in a cyclical fashion from wood to cardboard to wood again.

All of these associations with a material play a role here but through my own work a question still remained unanswered. Does the use of cardboard make for a 'cardboard like' piece of art? Or, for example, does the fact a sculpture that is made from stone make it a stone-like piece? With the findings from my word association exploration it might appear that artwork made from cardboard would have the qualities ascribed to it as shown in the table below.

From my own work I found that different associations took precedence when I manipulated the material. (For example the go cart now looked and felt like wood.)

From my personal stance I have explored these four associative factors but are these purely my own point of view?

• Artwork association (site, etc.)
• Bodily association (feelings)
• Former material association (e.g. cardboard to box)
• Basic form association

With these in mind I began to look at theory.

A Cardboard Case Study <   Cardboard City/Racing Green   > Theory

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