Four days before the show we got the space to ourselves. We had been sharing the workspace with a few other artists and It felt great to take ownership of the space and our work could now come alive and inhabit the space. We constructed the bigger pieces and played with their position. We considered how we directed the viewer through the space, the view on entry (the glamour shot!) and how we directed the audience to look through, into and upwards. The positioning of the lighting was important. We wanted the audience to create shadows, so that they became part of the work. We considered the idea of the audience as voyeur and participator. The lighting obviously lent itself to the theatricality of the work and created a brothel feel… well according to Seb!
Dan Howard Birt came in towards the end of the install to support us. The curtain had been hanging down and we pulled it back to reveal the domestic scene of the foam potato chippings, which previously been seen from the front as a shadow. The original idea was that the audience/viewer would walk behind and become part of the work as they would become a shadow. However this was happening already with shadows being created on the wall. Having the curtain pulled back seemed to embody the original idea of Stagestuck. Of a space of revealment and concealment. Here the viewer/participator’s was front and back stage , in front of and behind and ‘in’ the stage. The curtain hung this way also made reference to the history of the curtain in painting and the symbolism of the curtain as a meeting space of the conscious and unconscious, the known and unknown similarly to David Lynch’s use of the curtain that was discussed in an early Stagestuck blog.
Stagestuck 