The Power of Love

Continuing on from the previous post and the brief set by First Fold Records for the second edition of their publication 'Premier Pli', I have begun work on my precious four pages for the magazine. 'Nostalgia' is the brief and with it being such an incredibly personal subject I wanted to make small objects, trinkets that could be kept safely. Whenever I have the urge to clear out cupboards or drawers it is the big stuff that goes, the small stuff tends to survive and my thinking is that these small objects will act as memory aids, time-machines, a link from the 'now' me to the me in the past.

The things that have been important in the making of these objects are:

1. A desire to believe that personal trinkets possess innate magical properties.

2. The fan-fetishism associated with film props.

3. Time travel.

4. Making by hand.

5. The use of children's craft/ art materials.

6. Memory's ability to juxtapose facts and fictions into one flawless entity.

This blog post will focus on just one of the objects, future blogs will, no doubt, indulge the other three.

I happily managed to obtain some sheets of Shrinky Dinks (shrinkable plastic) with a view to make a replica of my mum's old Datsun Sunny with Back to the Future De Lorean time travel attachments.

Rather than write about it I think the pictures that follow tell a much more interesting tale. 

This piece is called 'The Power of Love' (a reference to the Huey Lewis & the News track and, therefore, Back to the Future). I completed it over about three days, just in case you were interested.

 

I will post a picture of the finished time-machine when 'Premier Pli 2' is published. It has been fun and games making these little objects and a lot of patience and love has gone into them. And maybe that's what it's all about, maybe that's what gives these objects their magic.

Thanks for popping by.

Shrinky Dink Time Travel

Art/ music collective First Fold Records have, over the past couple of years, encouraged me to be creative and the results of my endeavours have, thus far, been supported without question. They offer up projects that can take either audio or visual form and are very hard to turn down. I find it difficult to say ‘no’ as, for one thing, First Fold Records are an incredibly decent and amiable bunch of people and also the projects are so challenging and enticing. ‘Premier Pli’ is the record labels most recent venture. It is an occasional publication where artists/ musicians/ writers are invited to contribute pages of images or text and the work is linked by a theme selected by guest editors. This ‘commission’ has taken me in creative directions that I would never have travelled on my own and, add that to my wife’s invaluable critique and encouragement, I have pushed myself like never before to produce some of my most successful visual material to date.

For issue two of ‘Premier Pli’ the theme has been set by guest editors Pierre and Karlheinz. It is simply ‘Nostalgia’. The brief is to fill four pages with visuals and to contribute one audio track (for the cover CD) keeping the nostalgia theme in mind. The theme acts as a guiding light through the foggy seas of the creative process.

It has been a strange thing for me to think about nostalgia, the things that I am nostalgic about and the things that trigger these bizarre feelings. Nostalgia comes in many forms. From an idealised yearning for the past to being seen as a sickness often grouped in with melancholy in the early modern period (around 1500AD – 1800AD according to Wikipedia) nostalgia has many faces and therefore has numerous creative directions and possibilities. This can be overwhelming and yet incredibly seductive from a creative point of view.

Talking of nostalgia triggers, I read the words ‘Shrinky Dinks’ today. I probably hadn’t thought about this peculiar home craft item for maybe thirty years but those two mystical words opened a wormhole to my past and brought a whole load of happy memories back to me in an instant. This plastic material that you could draw on with colouring pencils and whack in your oven and cook triggering a magical transformation used to fill me with wonder. I am amazed to discover that this material is still available. I am overjoyed and inspired that this material is still available. Maybe this is a just a little hint that magic really does exist. By believing and instilling a certain supernatural quality to the things that, via nostalgia, we have put on pedestals we can journey back to happy times, to other worlds long thought dead or forgotten. We can travel to a time and place where, as a child, we used to actually make things by physically interacting with them. To the artists and crafts people who make stuff with their hands - stitch, stick, cut, sew, fold, paint, craft, sculpt - I salute you. I enjoyed my trip in the Shrinky Dink Time Machine. Thoroughly.