Degree Show

MOC

Motions of Care

A practice informed by working environments

Aestheticizing the Workplace 

(digital prints)

and

ONE DAY IN AMERICA 

(online video data bank)

Were the creative manifestations of key working environments

These working environments have included day habilitation facilities, support work, voluntary arts leader and counsellor in a summer camp and respite programme, working with adults and children with developmental disabilities.

The practicalities and absurdities of working in these environments in Scotland and the US has manifested itself into a visual dialogue amalgamating both experiences.

Appropriation has been key. Appropriating from care environments. Appropriating from the lives of others.

MoC object installation has been created using found and sourced objects. Objects from the work-place, the surrounding area and educational institutions. It presents the clerical, the bespoke and the everyday household item. The language of these objects expresses both specificity and commonality with a sense of play between the hidden, the discreet, the divulged and the compromising situation that lies between notions of the public and private. This installation is married with video and audio, duplicating specific resounding memories in a gallery setting.

These duplicate memories excavate one specific day in 2009. A day in which a personal loss was felt, eclipsed by the death of the King of Pop. Working with American teenagers with physical, emotional and behavioural issues on this day, the video installation ONE DAY IN AMERICA tracks various imagery, pop culture and musicality components to visually preserve these reminders whilst also suggesting universality through lack of ownership of the moving and fragmented image. These reminders have been entirely appropriated from video sharing websites pointing to the accessibility and efficiency that digital technologies and the media and governance put in place to ensure a person becomes a digital entity, broadly understood by institutions through data recordings.

MoC balanced with the more personal work of ONE DAY IN AMERICA explores the encouragement and dependency on digitisation. An act which can be acknowledged as "self-cultivating", it is an act in which the majority of the public may discuss and criticise current societal difficulties yet play no role in actively seeking change. Instead personal emphasis is put on principles of conformity - commodification, consumerism and materialism allowing for local, national nd global socio-political issues which fall under the all-encompassing term "social care" to remain in a state of immobilisation.