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The Unwanted Gift Shop: Week 3

It has been a great start to the Unwanted Gift Shop with new items donated each day…

I am really enjoying having time to think and play with ideas. Lots of people have been popping into the Artist Studio and it seems that the project is capturing people’s imagination, which is great!

During this residency I am going to reveal as much of my thinking and working process as possible, highlighting processes, successes, and failures along the way both within the Artist Studio space and in these blogs.

I have set myself the creative challenge to build a “cohesive” body of work from the items… this came from an interesting conversation with a curator who said that artists that have a “cohesive” body of work are often more desired by the art market as their work can easily be marketed and sold to galleries and collectors looking to invest.  As an artist who has so far ducked and dived around the “commercial” art world, and avoided being labelled as a “particular” type of artist, I felt that this challenge would set an interesting arena for me to produce work in. It also makes a direct link to the objects themselves; items from the commercial world, that have for one reason or another, lost their value in the eyes of their owners.

If you visit the Unwanted Gift Shop, you will notice the three colours, RED, BLACK and WHITE… this pallet will become more prevelant as the residency continues. The three colours have spiritual and psychological properties and they are also a homage to the history of artists going through particular colour periods and to the fashion and retail world which in this case states that “red, black and white are this seasons must have colours”.

Here are the most recent items…