The Daily Fishbowl: Self Directed Project-Collecting

Happy Easter everyone!
It's been a few day's since I updated this blog, all hail slow country Internet! But I have some posts ready to go now.

It started with collecting!

The self directed project is still in control, and we started with stripping out our studio spaces, and were encouraged to collect EVERYTHING. Now to be honest, I really didn't want to stick everything from empty coffee cups to band posters on my walls. There were plenty of people doing that, and there was already similarities between projects that were causing some tensions between people. I just didn't feel that was the direction I needed to be heading in. I 've spent this year trying to strip back my own process, and as I said in older posts, to learn to develop what is really essential to the idea itself. So to begin with, I'm going to look back over some of my projects from the year so far, and see what cropped up that I could develop further for this project.

Earlier projects:
Throughout the year so far, a lot of my projects have looked at themes like histories, local histories and stories. For example, during our first project Identity and Commemoration, my project was based on local history of Templemore, Co.Tipperary. In that case, I focused on the story of the Templemore Miracles (which I have finally got printed).
The performance project followed this, and my character had a narrative there, which came down to the idea of control A Tale of Nine .This was followed by the Site and Location project, which I think was my favourite to work on process wise The Final Cut: Site and Location project. Again, this came back to people and stories. During this project I developed an interest in the idea of trivia, and the happenings of the everyday. This could be from working with my good friend Donna and recording aspects of life that are so normal for us (or at least take place in areas that we know well and tend to over look). But the process itself worked really well. Because I was filming in Tipperary, but lived in Wexford Monday to Friday, It meant that I had to plan a schedule for getting work done in that two day slot every weekend. So all my research was done in those five day's, camera shots were planned. It was a busy five weeks!

And so collecting material began! I think working in the college studio is easier, it doesnt have 21 years of fun and distracting clutter like my room at home does....

So through my search for a source, I came back to using newpapers to build a story from. I did this during the Templemore Miracles project and it was something that I really wanted to come back to working with.
I found newspapers from 1973 burried in the loft. These are obviously not that old, but I am interested in the stories, language and visual imagery associated with newspapers. So this is essentially what my wall collection in studio consisted of:

"Our Boys was a boys' story paper published by the Educational Company of Ireland and the Christian Brothers, beginning in 1914. Modelled on the British "Boy's Own" tradition but informed by a Catholic and nationalist ideology, it included cartoons and prose adventure adventure stories in English and Irish. Like the British story papers it was based on, it included detective, western, explorer, boarding school, historical advanture and even science fiction stories, usually with Irish heroes."-Source