4 types of chalk

Amidst all this writing and drafting (and writing and drafting) i have been trying to keep up the practical side of things. So most weeks i have tried to do small, instinctive type projects just to try and get a feel for what i will do for my last project at University. The most recent of these has tentatively been titled 4 types of chalk. 


The project was pretty simple. I went to a nearby chalk cliff face armed with a pack of coloured chalk. Then just below the chalk line, on a man made wall, i drew a simple chalk line. I photographed the results and that was the project done.

I was left with a lot of photographs. They showed all stages of the process and from a number of angles.

The basic problem i had was what to do with all these images. So i spent some time looking through them and the more i looked the clearer it became that most of were not really that interesting. There was no need to have a repetitious cycle of chalk lines and the nature of the intervention could easily be conveyed with a single image. It is this image on the right that i felt was one of the most successful. There is a subtle link between the natural setting and my own intervention. Also the lack of colour not only gives the image a simple feel but also helps establish this link between the cliff face and line. The coloured chalk is clearly brought in to this place but the white chalk could plausibly have come from the cliff itself. As such it creates a dialogue with the site and becomes more about that specific location.  So we end with a single image. It was a bit hard to let go of all the images i had taken and also accept that the project was going to be different to how i had originally envisaged it. But it was an important process to go through and ultimately the work is more interesting as a result.