Exhibition | Open Closet at Lamberts Yard | Leeds College of Art Level 5 End of Year Show

The day of the Open Closet exhibition opening is here and the private view over. This evening was important for me to document both written and through photographs of people's response to my work. Looking at how they interacted, did they see it? did they say it out loud? what did they do with them? and so on. All for the purpose of understanding how an audience response to the works, especially as they are temporary works just like something overheard, you may not hear it again. This being the case, the work won't be present in the space for the weekend after the private view.

The exhibition was so busy I found it very hard to document, I was limited to being one person in a sea of people with a camera, the documentation was very small, I got a few photographs of people finding and reading the text. The best documentation I got was the stories people told me after the exhibition revolving around the handouts.

















Georgia told me that she was curious what the others said and this made her want to collect them in a way like you would collect pokemon cards. I quite liked this idea of people collecting and swapping found conversations. Another response was that people didn't see them as they fell out of the leaflet, this led to a pool of them on the floor which I witnessed others trying to rescue them from being trampled on. I heard a group having a conversation with each other using the handouts as prompts. And others doing what some of them said like instructions. It got a mix of responses from people some being throwaway and others wanting to collect every word.

Later that evening I received a tweet using one of the handouts to communicate with me which I loved. By taking these seemingly random sections of conversations and placing them in a gallery space for an audience to find, I have sparked responses that take the words into new meaning, which people have shaped into their own. This has shown me that I need to take my work out more often and let it be interacted with and only then will it become what I hoped to achieve.

Twitter link (Sophie)

@PaisleyJBoyd Where are you? pic.twitter.com/rYUCIjOklT
— Sophie M (@CleverlyPlanned) March 6, 2014