21 January 2012

Seminal work

As one develops one's creative work, certain pieces mark big steps, or even turning points. One of mine was the making of this "Boring Box" in a course at City Lit about ten years ago. The project was to make a box that expressed an emotion.
"Boring" isn't exactly an emotion, but I really worked on eliminating its opposite ("interesting") through using elements that I felt were boring - columns of (meaningless) numbers, endless repetition, words that restated the obvious, and neutral colours.
This was the first time I used a subtractive process rather than an additive one. Later I came across the saying by Saint-Exuprey that "perfection is finally attained when nothing more can be taken away" (rather than nothing more can be added) - but now I wonder ... would this perfection actually be boring, rather than satisfying?

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