Julie Dodd

http://juliekdodd.moonfruit.com/building-blocks-of-life/4549771843

When researching my idea I came across this artist that produced an installation in response to finding a lot of keepsakes that she had collected over her life.
She decided instead of holding onto them as keepsakes she turned them into this installation stating that:

'Building Blocks of Life' is a small installation which documents my life. Instead of holding onto keepsakes, drawings, letters, photographs etc., in the traditional manner of photo albums, scrap books etc. I have produced an installation where I've recycled these things, bringing them together to form the 'Building Blocks of Life'. Although unrecognizable they still hold the same memories for me.

i found that i started to think about my idea from the perspective of showing the objects that the inmates may have used or had in the time that they would have been in the workhouse.
 Because objects can show the identity they had within the workhouse even if it was just the clothes they wore it would have been something they may have held onto having been stripped of the identity they had when entering the workhouse.

http://www.willardsuitcases.com/
a project that I looked into was a project that was carried out in a closed asylum where they found suitcases of the people that would have been admitted, they can show the person identity and life through objects inside the space of a suitcase.

Scenarios

These two videos show one of the scenarios we started to work on from a story that we had found about a girl being asked to get up on the bar and dance to earn her drinks.

 

 This video is based on  the theme of showing the inner voice of a person that is feeling vulnerable and in a situation they don't want to be in but feel they cant say anything.

Animal farm

So far i have focused mainly on looking at  animal farm because it is based solely on the animals behavior and how they are represented. It has been very useful looking at this book because i have so far looked in to what the animals themselves mean and also what George Orwell meant by the use of the animals and why he chose them to represent the people that he chose them to represent.
The main story itself is based on the events leading up to the Russian revolution and the characters represent Stalin and his influence and eventual downfall and those who surrounded him.
I have found this story very useful because there is a lot of information surrounding the representation of the animal and what the story meant politically, i wish to look into more stories like this that may have had a political influence and also compare it to stories that involve animals in a human world.

I started to look into stage adaptions of animal farm and how the designer in turn has chosen to represent the animals as characters. i have so far found this production of animal the most useful.

 http://www.steppenwolf.org/plays-events/productions/index.aspx?id=631

start of southwell idea!

After visiting Southwell workhouse a few times I've noticed that i have focused on looking at the identity of people and how i can represent this in my installation. I noticed that i was focusing a lot on the objects within the spaces and also thinking about how the people would have felt within the space having been so controlled even their view on what they looked out on was controlled.
I really like the factor of how they entered the workhouse with nothing
 and I would like to focus on this factor, it interested me to think that they had no possessions not even their own clothes. I started to think about how their lives were constricted within a certain frame of thinking and even what they could see was limited by the windows they looked out of. This got me thinking about how i can represent people within objects, i started to think about frames because to me a persons i identity can be shown within a picture which is often in a frame. I want to play around with the use of frames and what they might represent to different people. Also for me i wanted to involve the use of the control that the inmates had within the building of the workhouse, i was interested in using some of the keys that we were shown on a visit. This to me shows the control that the master and mistress would have over the inmates and the sound that they would create if suspended would recreate the noises that would have echoed around the building itself.

puppet so far

This is how far i have got with my puppet, i still need to carve a lot of the torso and head to get it looking more like how i want it to be eventually but i have managed to get all the parts together and the joint work really well. i found it quite easy to carve in the end once all the parts are cut out. its good to see them in use and to see how they would move around when we manipulate them because this has allowed me to see what adjustments in need to make in the future.
So far we have been working on small scenarios that we may find the puppets in from the material we have collected, it has allowed to see which works best in which scenarios due to scale and manipulation.

For example we started to work on one of the scenarios we had an idea for from the text and we found that we started of with the larger puppet being the 'victim' and found this didn't really work with the antagonist as a smaller puppet so we swapped them over and it worked much better.

Southwell third visit

 On this visit we were asked to walk around the building taking in any sounds smells and to note anything that we found interesting visually and anything that we might have felt that the building might have been like to be there when it was still a workhouse.
I mostly noted that the building would have been:
-cramped
-dark
-cold
-sounds from other rooms would have been heard round the building
-loud

editing the script

So far we have broken the material down into collections of where we gathered them and then started to look at the individually to see how we can arrange them into a conversation. One of the events we went to 'Equalitea and cake' we got some really great interviews and the material we have is set out into a conversation, so we started by using this as the bases because we felt this was very good material and was already in the set up that we wanted.

We took the conversation and placed it into another document and started to highlight bits of the text that would gather the information and stories into categories such as work, nights out or gym.We then started to look at some of the other material that we had collected and cut and paste these into the conversation as part of the characters stories or as scenarios that we could potentially act out using the puppets.

model box

After talking with Sarah at Southwell workhouse about the thoughts i have had about the project i f that my installation would be good to do as a journey around the workhouse and was thinking i could locate it in a few of the rooms around the workhouse. Possibility of doing a main installation within the green room and then smaller parts of the piece in other locations. I have started to build a model box of the green room becuase i think this would fit will with my idea and possibly the room just before this one, also thought about the entrance of the workhouse and the stairs leading out.

Gathering the material

This is the link to the radio show that I transcribed:
 Feminist Society Radio flyfm.co.uk recording

We started to gather the material that we would need to eventually form our script, there were a few events that we found that were on and we went along to interview people. We also started to transcribe some of the interviews and i also found that the Nottingham Trent feminist society had been on the flyfm student radio so I transcribed this.