Week 1, project 1

'ROUGH GUIDE'

Lets rewind back to the first week, first project on BA Textiles at Chelsea.

Task 1: to compile research about different areas of London into 100 copies of a collaborative group book...Our own 'Rough Guide' to the City, containing one page of work from every single person's individual sketchbook on our course. It was an exciting, if not slightly daunting task!

A friendly face in Chinatown
(author's own, September 2013)

My group was given the focus area of Chinatown, Soho and Covent Garden. To start, we just went there and explored. I quickly found that wandering slowly around central London with a sketchbook is an interesting experience. Seeing as people are usually in a rush with somewhere urgent to go or a specific task to do, I got some rather odd looks as I stood and sketched, picked things up off the street and took rubbings from nicely textured surfaces. I met a few friendly people along the way, though!

Almost immediately, I felt quite drawn to doorways. It interested me that each door was different, and that so many people passed through them everyday, but probably didn't pay much attention to them. I felt like every door had it's own personality. The intercoms were especially fascinating.

It started to feel like a game: going round from door to door, peering at the name labels on the buzzers, looking the shapes of the buttons to press and call people...while resisting the urge to just press the whole lot! Some doorways were painted really great, vibrant colours, and I got a bit obsessed drawing every door I passed.

Drawing doors- sketchbook pages (author's own, September 2013)

I realised that I'd found my personal area of interest for the Rough Guide. It was fun to be working on a project again, and I wanted to keep the playful feeling I had when I was out exploring, clear in my work. Repeatedly revisiting the location helped to feed my thinking (while giving me the chance to keep drawing doors!), so I was quite excited for our first group tutorial, where we'd be selecting which page we'd be contributing to the class book. My tutor Cathy commented that she really liked the intercoms. In light of my playful approach to the research, I decided I wanted to make my final page somehow interactive. The aim was to take the 100 copies of our page (one for each of the 100 books!), and then customise them with something, so they were all individually hand-worked/drawn/sewn into. 

Experimenting a bit in my sketchbook helped me think about how I could play with my pages- literally! Cutting away holes where buttons should be and changing the colours and messages on the intercom all worked well for my concept. 

Playing with intercoms- sketchbook pages

So finally, it was just the small matter of applying my idea to 100 copies of the image I'd selected for my page! I wanted to change all the name labels on the intercom picture to names and messages of people from my course, so that every book would be personal to us. It took a whole morning to go around the group and collect the names and messages. Each page turned out slightly different, depending on what people wrote. Here's a couple of samples: 

...And a few snaps of how to final collaborative book turned out (one of my photos made the cover, hooray!)