Workplace Extraction (Patreon)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about time and art and work.

I’ve just had my busiest period of freelance work for the year and part way through I decided that I needed to do something to try and keep practising my own art while at work. Some way of mining my surroundings for things that are valuable to my practice. I started collecting some small bits of very specific waste materials that would otherwise be thrown away, and I also started filming.

Filming became quite a good coping mechanism to combat the feeling of frustration at not being able to be doing my own art, it felt like I was reclaiming some of my time, some of my labour somehow. Also looking at an environment with filming in mind helps me see it in a new light, sparking interest and appreciation that had gradually faded away over the years spent working there.

I want to be careful about blurring the boundaries between this work and my practice though, because while bringing my practice into work helps me at work, it becomes a two way thing where my work starts seeping out into my life outside of it. I want to extract but then use the material I’ve gathered in ways that are less regurgitative than just making work about that specific workplace. I don’t want to use my own time to interview co-workers or bosses, I don’t want to make a documentary. I want it to be about more than that, or something different from that.

Here is the film so far. I think it might become part of a larger project about time and labour. Maybe with some kind of voice over, maybe with some fiction sprinkled in, and maybe it’s part of an installation with sculpture and text, we shall see.

Hope you enjoy!