This project was based around the book Ulysses by james joyce, as part of the message, audience and context unit for my ma. Initially we were given a section of the text from chapter 11, with no indication of the context behind the words or where they came from. We were given the task to react to the words and develop our work from there. the words I was given were 'BRONZE BY GOLD HEARD THE HOOFIRONS, STEELYRINING IMPERthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips.'
The words that stood out for me at first glance were ‘chips’ and ‘hoofirons’. Connecting these words to familiar objects I began experiments with objects I had on hand, using oven chips and ketchup to experiment with type, jewellery making and photography, and my neglected iron and the heal of a boot to make print experiments. These experiences were a reflection of the obscurity of the text, taking something ordinary and making it unordinary and simply following my instincts upon first hearing the text. My experiments were drawn from my train of thought, as well as connections to my influences. For instance, the text itself reminded me of the weird worlds created by David Lynch, which made me think of the severed ear from Blue Velvet, which is how I ended up making earrings out of chips. From the outside, this may seem arbitrary but these were the connections my brain made and thus I thought it would be best to follow my intuition. This resulted in a solid collection of experiments and images that I could use as building blocks to create further images.
Following this, I collaborated with other students to further the project and bring it to a more conclusive project. We were given the task to create a new context for our work, and decided to create a catalogue of a collection of bizarre oddities based on what we had previously created, inspired by the works of designers like Philippe Starck.
We were then given the task of finding a new way to present ulsysses to a 21st century audience. After a lot of brainstorming and idea development we came up with the idea of creating a 'luxury' fashion house, and created a lookbook based on the products we made. The collection itself is based around everyday objects and jobs which James Joyce may have come across when navigating the streets of Dublin. Though, instead of actually selling the garments themselves, we chose to create an ‘ikea cataloge-style’ instruction booklet which would instruct the reader how to put together the garnemnt from their own materials. We wanted to encapsulate the feeling of the everyday by removing the context in order for the items to exist in their own right. This would also subvert our audience, the people who are interested in high fashion collections, in that it satirises the high fashion world. It would also be a commentary on the juxtaposition between the exclusive, high fashion world of the 21st-century and the working-class world of the early 20th-Century Dublin.
Was part of the project we came up with the concept of having a 'launch event', something that you could only get an invite to by having a receipt from our (non-existent) previous collections, as a way of mocking the exclusiveness and inaccessibility of the high fashion world. The location of our drop would be in ‘code’, using the app ‘what three words’, a service that gives every square meter on earth a three-word location code that can be searched via the app or the website. This shows a clear link between the original text, being at first glance a random string of words, and it also brings it into the 21st century using state of the art technology which would be so alien to someone living at the time of Joyce.
