A4 Sheet – Time Project

A blank slate. Nothing corrupting it, condemning it. Pure, milky white. Where creativity starts, where art will end. There’s something peculiar about the way people feel about blank spaces. We feel the need to fill them at times, whether that may be between the pages of our notepads or darkened city streets waiting to be illuminated. Sometimes a blank page can be more meaningful than a filled page. The chance for opportunity and idea is boundless.

It’s easy to be intimidated by a blank piece of paper, staring into you. Because it knows what it is. The art is already there, represented in the mind, you just need to find it using the tools accessible to you. To fear the creation is to repress the imagination, your mind turns into a blank piece of paper, without a third party member to alter it.

Now, this beautiful sheet doesn’t just have to be the canvas to your thoughts. The medium in which innovation flows. It can also be the subject In one of Yayoi Kusama’s pivotal art pieces, Self Obliteration (1967), Kusama transforms her surroundings by putting on polka dots on them. Her purpose was to let people “obliterate” themselves, and turn them back to nature, because the environment around them too are polka dotted. Kusama wanted to create unity between the people and nature, to obstruct that disconnection within today’s society. This aesthetic inspired us to use a blank A4 paper as the subject. It is easy to “frame” art within a blank piece of paper, but maybe the frame would be outside of the intended frame. Something as simple as polka dots can have such a powerful impact, and sew together what has been cut and separated.

In reality, every art piece is framed by its environment as much as it is framed by a literal frame. The concept of being able to have an exhibition for works of art is highly dependent not only on the framing of pieces, but on the positioning of where they are placed on a wall, in a case or placed on the floor. The positioning of the artwork drastically changes our perception of it, and by default we are responsible for the actual piece of art as much as where we choose to put it in relation to it’s space. Through this collaborative work, we would like to portray the essence of how an environment can change an artwork, its meaning and its significance. To make this concept stand out even more so, we would like to be using a plain blank piece of A4 paper as the center of a series of photographs, however the focus will be on the environment surrounding it. Taking photos in vastly different types of environments will only help to show this contrast to help show that sometimes the environment is meant to enhance or improve the state of an artwork, even if the metaphorical ‘artwork’ we will be using is a blank page.

Video compilations of the blank page in the middle of the page. The white block is up for the audiences interpretation whilst the ever-changing border provides different surroundings to help highlight the image in our heads. We can even argue that the blank space can be a “filled” void, that the white is an actual art piece. The lack of detail makes this image full or empty, there can be many interpretations. The perspective you have on this can tell you a lot about yourself, it is a reflection of your inner self.

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An A4 page was what peaked both me and Shaskia’s attention in what we could use as a way of using the frame instead of the subject matter as an artwork. As a result, we decided to venture out into the streets of Paris to see what we could find for inspiration with our choices in backgrounds. Originally, we used actual A4 paper to take photos of when we went out, but consequently dropped them on accident, and the actual trials didn’t appear as clear as we originally planned.