Taking art too seriously makes my skin crawl and my creativity clam up. Have you ever done a doodle in the margin of a notebook when you were supposed to be doing something else and it is the best thing you have ever drawn? Then, while riding that wave of artistic confidence you try to draw it again with the right paper, the right tools, loads of time to spare, and you can’t do it? That is a habit I’m trying to shake, and I find the more instinctive my ideas are, the better they turn out.
While brainstorming for a brief two years ago, I came up with Office Space. This came from a brain vortex of youtuber KickthePJs video of the same name (“In an office, no one can hear your dream”), my own frustration at sitting at the same desk every day and the Flying Dutchman from Pirates of the Caribbean (“part of the ship, part of the crew…”etc) I would look out the window at people moving around in the college grounds outside and feel like I was melting into the desk. So I wanted to create sculptures that would fit in an office, but visually and surprisingly reflect how office workers might be feeling.
Office Space took shape in a series of sketches, very much cartoon inspired. There was a table of coffee mugs, with a melted person filling them all. There was a sleeping employee with a computer monitor for a head, his snores making Zs in the digital space. My favourite of all was the employee who had had an incident with the photocopier, getting sucked in so their legs were left on the outside and their printed torso came out on paper. Ouch.
After a wasted week trying to brainstorm some more, clamming up creatively and trying to force uninspiring ideas, Office Space was a go!
The photocopier was the piece I wanted to make most, but where on earth was, I going to find a spare photocopier just lying around? I was ready to dismiss it, until I mentioned it to my Mum who mentioned it to a colleague, and would you believe it a photocopier was being thrown out of a church hall in Methven and would I like to have it for free? I do not know how many stars aligned to make that happen, but I was not going to question it!
After that anticlimactic hurdle, it was building time. A quick photo and a few clicks on Photoshop and I had the printed torso, but what about the legs? They needed to be able to support themselves to look semi-realistic but be mouldable enough to hide the end in the photocopier. I decided to use chicken wire, fashioned into tubes, and stuffed in an old pair of jeans and boots. Shaping these was a little tricky and very prickly but the end result was perfect.
Then the final finishing touch. An instillation isn’t just about the piece itself, but where its installed, and I had the perfect place. The Art studio is usually a very serene place, usually fully of students with earphones in and a deadline to meet. It’s also the location of the downstairs printer. Getting the damn photocopier into college in the boot of a Honda Jazz was nothing short of hell and I wont go into it now for fear of nightmares, but it made it and the set up could begin. I get into college really early, around 8am when the doors first open and when any self respecting student is still in bed. All I had to do was wheel it along to the studio and slot it in beside the functioning photocopier, with enough room for legs. Thanks to a last minute brainwave, I quickly scribbled out a quick Out of Order sign and the project was finished!
I wish I had left a camera to catch some reactions, because the few people I spotted or talked to about it reacted brilliantly. Those are my favourite kind of instillations, blended in but just strange enough to shake you out of your routine. At the end of the year we got the customary email about any work that’s left in the studio will be disposed of. I thought I’d take them up on that and let them deal with the lump of extremely heavy office equipment. However, a few years have passed and if you go into the studio, you can still find the photocopier with the legs still sticking out in its original position. It really is an absolute bugger to move.
Follow me at @ljttlemoon_art for more!
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