In weeks 4-6 we move to work with part of the client’s creative brief.
‘Space and time for contemplation beyond our everyday life.’
This statement is taken from the art gallery’s mission statement and is one of the values they aim to achieve as an organisation.
The concept of ‘everyday life’ has been explored and written about by artists, social scientists, creative writers, and scholars from many disciplines. You can see some examples in the Everyday Life in Middletown project.
The project provides a summary “What is everyday life”?
Routine daily activities eating, commuting, daydreaming, internet-surfing, tooth-brushing—take up a huge proportion of our lives. But we are barely conscious of them, and their nature and meaning have proven ambiguous and hard to pinpoint.
To point to just a few of Everyday Life’s complexities: everyday routines (morning dog-walking, making breakfast, talking in bed) can be reassuring and comforting. And the same routines can become boring, deadening, dreary—sometimes within the same week, or the same day.
This notion of providing people with space and time for contemplation beyond our everyday life is a core aim for many art organisations. There is an interest in art providing people with experiences they would not get through everyday activities. It could be argued that art through the way it transports our thinking to places we have not considered before, is often seen as providing experiences ‘beyond our everyday life.’ In relation to responding conceptually to ‘space and time for contemplation beyond our everyday life’, we need to consider experiences that awaken our senses in new ways.
The Everyday Life in Middletown project, they write about and opposite of the everyday the ‘event:
Everyday life is perhaps most easily defined via the binary opposition between “the everyday” and “the event.” The everyday is characterized by repetition, banality, drift, and flow—it disappears as it’s happening, often beneath the level of conscious attention. It rarely gets recorded and thus is difficult to fix and study. The event, in contrast, stands out from the flow and drift of the everyday. Histories, biographies, memoirs, and archives record events; the everyday escapes into the gaps–in historical records, in life stories, between disciplines.
Working from this idea of the ‘events’, I suggest art, unlike daily life, can make us conscious of ourselves and the world around us.
In relation to the sculpture park at McC, these beyond our everyday experiences are a combination of the natural bush environment at McC and the sculptures in the park.
References:
Ball State University 2020, Everyday Life in Middletown, viewed 8 August 2020,