The images below show a series of small works I made at the beginning of September as a way of getting back into a regular studio practice. I thought that by following a set of simple instructions I could begin making work while avoiding some of the pressure and procrastination that I invariably experience following an extended period away from the studio. The detail of this assignment was fairly arbitrary, as my intention was simply to make something each day without worrying too much about what that thing may be.
The instructions – which I never actually wrote down, but which I understood perfectly well – can be summarized as follows:
- Make a cardboard cut-out of a horse [roughly following a template which was originally drawn from a Google Images search result];
- Paint the cut-out [using acrylic paint];
- Add hair [using colored wool attached with some combination of glue, tape or staples];
- Add eyes [using plastic “googly eyes” fixed with glue or staples];
- Chose a name for the horse [which should follow current race horse naming conventions, and which should be listed as “available” on the British Horse Racing Authority‘s Horse Name Availability database];
- Write the chosen name, and the date that the name was chosen, on the front of the cut-out;
- Repeat this exercise, making one cut-out every day, for as long as seems necessary.
In the end I only repeated this exercise for a few days as once I had gotten back into the routine of working I quickly moved on to pursue different projects. In a way this suggests that the assignment did function as intended, and that I simply discarded it once it was no longer needed.
Only now that I have reflected on this work do I see that my instructions are not unlike those found among Paul Thek’s Teaching Notes, which I used to source a project for our previous Art Assignments and Learning Theories learning module (described n more detail here).
