Art and Design boundaries

This is a new course I am joining, it started last week, Monday 12 March.

In this course we first talked about public art, street art and environmental art. The teacher introduced us to these kinds of art by showing a powerpoint with works in there from:

Banksy

Anish Kapoor

Niki de saint Phalle

Antony Gormley

After that we got the assignment:

Combine things like street art, environmental art and public art. Tell the public your story, your style and everyone's creative philosophy in this project. Make your own public work for one day.

I came with the next idea: I will make make ball shaped pieces of porcelain. I will stand somewhere in the public space where a lot of people are passing by. I will ask the persons who pass by, to grab 1 ball and throw it at the ground. Before they do that I will ask them to, when they throw it,  think about something that upsets them  or that makes them angry (in their life or world wide). I will collect the pieces that are on the ground, those pieces have the anger of the people within them. 

Then I am having a few ideas about what to do with those pieces, maybe I will order them on size, this one interests me the most, it is about ordering the anger in size, of course it doesn't work like that in life but that's why it interests me so much, to 'measure' something that you actually can't measure. 

Another one is to make something 'new' out of those pieces, a new shape that represents something 'good', that's actually made out of anger. And there is one more, that is making tableware from the broken pieces, glue them together with glaze and fire it again.

There are a lot of options and although my preference goes out to the first idea, I will keep on thinking while I am working on the balls.

I have chosen for this ball shape because: The balls in a christmas tree are there to keep the bad spirits away, the ball is made as a mirror and the bad spirits can't face them self's. Another thing is that it is round and it represents some kind of circle, the circle of life.

'It represents 'good' compared to 'evil''

I started to make the moulds for the balls.

I have 5 of those moulds so I can do high production.

Only a few to go, want to make around a 100 or 200 as many as possible. We have an exhibition at the 23Th. of April. We will see how far I will come, I want to make something from the pieces so I have to start firing them in about 2 weeks.

So the 18th of April I am going to ask people to throw these balls.
I hope there will be around 80 people who want to help me.

Here is a map with some info on it. The circle is where I will stay during this day.

'Hello Jirina,

We met earlier and we here at the Arabiakeskus have decided a place for your performance. It's in the front yard, but not infront of the main doors or the new M-kauppa supermarket and it has to bee away from the Fiskars factory doors. The date is OK, but please come between 10.30-16.00 hours.

Br. Petra Kurtti,

Coor Service Management, Arabiakeskus'

So lets do it!

Today (18-04-2012) is the big day, I am going to perform on Finnish grounds!!

Here are some of the results:

I would like to thank the people who helped me breaking the balls!

And thanks to Michelle for making the photos and videos for me!

This week I exhibit my work at the main entrance of Aalto University. You can come and take a look of my art work and the art works of my colleague students, it will be there until the 4th of may. Here are a few pictures taken from there.