I have become increasingly interesting in using interventions within my practice as I feel that the message of the work is giving a much richer contexts and connects more to the urban environment of which I am talking about. I also feel that much of my work is about getting a message across and encouraging people to re-think their relationship to their city and the wider urban environment, to re-look an re-consider the opportunities and why we behave in a certain way.
I felt that in order to make the connection that I intended for my work and ideas and to allow them to have the impact and reaction I was intended then I needed to open up my presentation beyond the sheets of paper and screenprints. I decided that along with some of the bigger interventions and statements that smaller pieces such as these train tickets would give me another angle and relate to my ideas of seeing the details.
I used train tickets as my basis for this intervention as I wanted to connect to the idea of the everyday and to catch the city dweller who just goes from A to B on autopilot without ever really looking up, whether for work or to visit the generic and entrapping high street or mall. To catch them off guard by taking something so ordinary and so ingrained in our experience of the everyday city and play with it's message and encourage a different view of the city.
It also interests me as I feel train tickets relate to the way I see new places when I travel. That these little things, objects: Metro tickets, street signs, road markings are the everyday peices of that place, the real things and the objects of true connection to the place and it's people. It's about the familiar becoming the strange, uncanny and exciting at home as well as abroad, taking that same feeling and enabling that wonder to occur everyday.
What is also interesting here is the fact that I leave my interventions in situ to be taking, looked at and interacted with. I leave my blog address in the hope of a direct response but I know that is mostly unlikely. What is nice and also exciting is the fact that I am leaving these items with the hope that they will be picked up and have an impact, I may never know, but I might just change someones whole outlook and even life, and that is were I see the real power in intervention art.
