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The quest of capturing the past |
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The quest is to capture the past, to offer a glimpse into the past 25 years of varied projects realised by Boogertman + Partners. The essence of what the company has accomplished during this period could not be captured through photography, neither by wielding the literarians pen. It had to be related through emotion, through experience, and by means of the unbiased portrayal and testimony from an uninvolved, neutral third party.
This, in a nutshell, was the concept. The quandary was still how the testimony could be captured in printable form; how the emotional experience could be portrayed within the bounds of a book. The answer, however, was simple, yet daunting. We had to expose ourselves to artists, to their honest and personal portrayal of the experiential qualities of a specific project.
B+P promptly set about selecting an inclusive series of projects identifying the varied range of building typologies realised within the company past. Independently, the search started for a group of artists that could fulfill the task at hand.
I immediately knew then that the medium should be works on paper maybe a little biased due to my great love and appreciation for prints, but also due to the limited time frame. Printmaking, although an incredibly skilled and integrated medium, is able to be created in a relatively short space of time and, once the plate is produced, it is easy to print a whole edition of 15, as was required in this instance. The Artist Proof Studio, in Newtown, was selected as the institution of choice, due to their impeccable reputation as a master printing studio, and even more so due to the enormous role they play in the education of artists in printmaking.
The brief was very specific the building should under no circumstances be copied as a direct visualisation of the images included in the brief packages, but should rather reflect the artists personal emotional experience of the specific building, its context, or the occupants thereof. The nineteen artists where given three project envelopes each, containing a brief along with a series of images of a specific building. Each artist was to create preliminary sketches of their first impressions. The artists were, furthermore, required to write a short explanation that made reference to the specific project, illustrating the initial idea, inspirations, emotions, and thought processes experienced whilst creating the artwork.
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