English Oak Tree and Wheat Field

Here is a beautiful book that Phoebe found when we visited special collections the other week. English Oak Tree and Wheat Field by Robert Maude contains a series of photographs taken over the space of a year. Each photograph is labelled by each month. I thought it was a simple way of showing something changing over time. Obviously we don't have a year, but in half an hour light conditions could change or the weather. We might even get some wonderful Manchester rain and it could wash away any ink and the piece could crumble away in front of our eyes. Sorry the photographs are terrible.

Daniel Buren

Green and white paper on door
Galerie Apollinaire, Milan, 1968

French artist Daniel Buren first refusing to take part in Project 68 exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, led to his first solo exhibition where by he covered the front door of the gallery in Milan with striped papers, making it impossible to enter. He abandoned the idea of painting and the art system, and responded to how work is transformed by its context/ surrounding space.

Obviously in the middle of writing my essay! But it just made me wonder about part two of our project of taking our layered pieces into an environment and why/ how are we going to do it? What do we think will happen? Would it change at all in a space of 30 minutes? Where could we try out and experiment this idea in different places?

Sophie Calle. 'The Chromatic Diet' & 'Birthday celebration'

'Calle's work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. As she descibes (below), the form of the final product - the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees - is the least significant part.'

Over a fourteen-year period, aside from the occasional year of disruption, Sophie calle held an annual dinner party on the evening of her birthday. To each celebration she invited a group of friends and relatives, the precise number of invitees corresponding to the number of years of her age, with one additional, anonymous guest nominated by a chosen guest, in order to symbolise the unknown of her future. She initiated these dinner parties to ensure that her birthday was remembered each year.

They were the most ambitious of a series of rituals Calle had invented to override an obsessive insecurity she experienced in early adulthood. The guests brought gifts, tokens of love and affection, and she displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet, as a constant reminder of this affection. At the end of the year the objects were boxed up and put away, their places taken by the gifts of another birthday dinner party. At stressful moments over the years Calle was able to unpack the boxes and reassure herself of her networks of support. When she became forty in 1993, Calle realised she had been cured of this obsessive insecurity and no longer felt the necessity to recall her friendships and family ties in such a formal way.

Judy Chicago’s 'The Dinner Party'

The Half.

Martin Sheen
Jim Broadbent

Stephen Fry


Jane Horrux

Kevin Spacey
James Cromwell
Rufus Sewell


Anthony Hopkins

Joanna Lumley