Progress: December 17, 2009

Gave a presentation of my work at Laboratoire NT2 at UQAM as part of FAIS TA VALISE!, a Montreal School Board project co-produced with the Fine Art faculty at Concordia and Hexagram. While I concentrated on the collaborative project Fugues, I briefly showed the Tongue Rug project to talk about process.

Trying to describe my project to a class of grade 6 students (age 10), I quickly realized that I needed to resort to plain everyday language. Vague art speak was not going to cut it. What was this project about?

Told them that I was cycling to different bodies of water with my family names and this was creating a path in the landscape. Each waypoint is represented by a tongue in the tongue rug. The structure is participative as the public can send their own stories about these placenames by commenting on the blog, filling out a form or simply through haphazard meetings. In this way, I do not know what the final tongue rug will look like. It will depend on my travels in space and in time, with my interactions with people.

They seemed to readily accept the logic (or whimsy) behind it. I loved that the kids didn’t focus on the “why” of the project but honed in on specific details: why were the tongues labeled so? I tried to explain that the tongue rug could have a different shape and be animated differently were we to travel to waypoints with their family names for example.

I showed them my dusty old Lake of the Woods Tongue Rug, that had initially served as my inspiration. (The back of the rug is made with burlap sack from Lake of the Woods Milling). Talked of objects that can be used as archives, both past (handicraft) and present (virtual). I truly enjoyed sharing my ideas and the creative process with them. Their spontaneous and uncluttered feedback was refreshing.