Here is a familiar place to be—even for those who don’t do art—you are told simply to choose something. In this case, I must choose an object to produce a body of artwork with over the next seven weeks. That this object could be just about anything makes the task more difficult, not less. I’m sure it could even be something you’d hesitate to call an object such as water, a sound, or a film clip (we are rather open-minded people in fine art you see). An abundance of choice can often be crippling but I might get the inclination to start moving forward if only I could narrow it down a little.

It stands to reason that some of those choices are going to be worse than others. On my desk as I write this I have a deodorant can, a mechanical pencil and a roll of tape—among other things—these are all objects of course but are any of them what I would want to choose for this project? I am going to have to make some art with this thing after all, I have to wonder if that might become more difficult depending on the object I choose.

One way to approach this project would be to only consider objects that are easy to manipulate and to acquire multiples of, that would give me some opportunities that other objects might not. If I should choose an object using this set of criteria then I might make something akin to Jonathan Callan’s book sculptures, in this way I would be using the object as a medium much as I might use paint or clay. This is an attractive approach because it would allow me to continue to explore the object many times over and in many different ways, even if I should do irreparable damage to one of them I can always get more.

That is one approach to the task—and an elegant way to limit your choices—but it’s not the only way of doing things. My inclination is instead, to choose just one thing and have it remain in the same state throughout the course of the project, instead of working directly with the object, I would use abstractions. That is to say, that the object itself will remain untouched, but in my imagination—and through whatever tools I employ—I will be able to manipulate the object endlessly. I may even do things that it would not be possible to do through manipulating the physical object itself, consider Salvador Dali’s melting clocks or just about anything from 20th-century abstract art.

I do not yet know what I will choose but I’m inclined to think that it should be a complex shape, something that has a distinct silhouette such that it would be recognisable almost no matter how it came to be represented. The deodorant can that I mentioned before is little more than a cylinder, the same can be said of the mechanical pencil and the roll of tape. A teapot would be more fitting for what I have in mind but so might a number of other things, I will keep my mind open for the time being and tomorrow I’ll take a look around some charity shops to see what I can find.