OVER THE FENCE SERIES

Here we go. Putting the studio online. At the moment the studio is the garage in my family home while I spend Level 4 isolation with them. Working in this new environment I have designed, played, trialled and made, but something was missing.

As a maker, my primary love, passion, incentive and resource has always been people. Audiences. Spectators. But quarantine has taken the possibility of people in close proximity away. I struggled with this for 3 weeks. I was making for people who weren’t there. Weren’t allowed near me or my work. The answer seemed to be - ‘go digital’. Personally, the push into the digital made me nervous, I felt I was betraying the type of art I make. Digitally, the work would miss the texture, the human eye, the spontaneity and the physical interaction.

Over the weeks, I have drifted away from the dark space of my garage, with the majority of my time spent in the front garden. On the other side of the fence I could hear, and partly see, people pass by in their bubbles. This was the closest people could get to my work.

This series is about me rebelling against the digital, the push for arts to be on a screen. The screen is only to catch the multitudes, so initially I want to turn to my front fence, to the 20 people who pass by everyday. I want to create an experience for them, however brief. The digital is to record and share ideas and thoughts (not the experiences).

The next few posts will be of the works I have put up.

I never got to talk to those who saw them and don’t know their names or faces. But we shared something together. Just over the fence.

Elekis *