15th & 22nd October

The words in space project seemed like something I could get my teeth into and enjoy at the same time. I began the brief with a huge outlook on words and the idea of space and I think most people will have chosen to play about with one of the two keywords. I thought about what words are at first - a collection of letters to make a meaningful verbal expression. A grouping of linguistic symbols under a system. A symbol itself. A logo. Binary. Morse code. Mouthing words. Hand gestures. Colours can even sometimes act as words. Once you've begun to delve into a certain area of words you must consider which words and why. If these words are made 3D you automatically start working with space also. During crits I think a few people maybe didn't go as far as they might have liked because they focussed on only one of the two keywords.

I opted to start off experimenting with physical words and see how they can interact with one another in the physical and spatial sense. The newspaper was the obvious source for these primary words. I intended, once I had learned about how I could evoke a sense of space and words, to print out bigger words - maybe in different, meaningful typefaces, and cut them into sturdy, card shapes. Unfortunately I was taken in by my primary experiments with photography and moving the card cut-outs around the room/a card box and playing with shadows. After the first crit, the idea came up that maybe it was a fitting scenario for the newspaper headlines, which today seem almost a cliche in themselves, to be in a stage set sort of environment. The addition of lighting from small candles and hand held torches helped the atmosphere of the resulting images and I have been successful in this brief at engaging with the two concepts of space and words. With more time I would surely have gone on to improve certain aspects - the words I used, their size, their form (typefaces) and the lighting/colour.