Living Gallery Evaluation - Robyn Mae-Harriott

Site Specific Evaluation

Robyn-Mae Harriott

I think our final piece was a successful performance. After having many ideas of what to do for our living gallery, our final piece was a still image of Megan and I sitting on two windowsills and above us we had written all our similarities and differences on some paper we had sellotaped to the wall.

We wanted this image to convey the different perceptions that different brain- or perhaps the same brain- can have.

Strengths:

We controlled our audience members well. We had a sign next to our overview that said “3-5 people at a time please”. And people did stick to the rule. This was an important thing for Megan and I to do, because it controlled the amount of people that could come down the small isle. In our health and safety

Myself and Megan were successful with how we interacted with our audience. We didn’t want our piece to be a scene or to intimidate the audience. We wanted to be able to talk to our audience and ask them how they felt about our piece and how they felt about our society and the different points of views people have. By talking to the audience, it gave us the opportunity to inform the audience, what we had been working on this term and what message we wanted to convey in our living gallery. We got to ask people what they thought about our piece and answer any questions they wanted to ask us. It gave me a stronger connection to my audience members, it was also successful because most people weren’t shy or afraid to interact with us. This was good for our piece as it helped it to develop.

Our message was to show our audience that we are all the same on the inside but just different on the outside. We wanted our audience to think about they way they view people and the initial thoughts they have on someone when they first see someone. It was important for us to convey the message of equality and we wanted the audience to think about the fact that everyone is human, everyone is created by genes and chromosomes and everyone is have bones and a heart. Throughout the process leading up to our living gallery, we explored how the mind views people when they first see them, and that is that a lot of people judge from looks and don’t actually think about the fact that we are all equal in reality. When we spoke to our audience members, some of them guessed what our piece represented- and guessed right which shows that our piece was successful in conveying the right message. If people didn’t quite understand, Megan and I would explain what we wanted them to take away from it and they would understand and liked our idea.

Weaknesses:

The main weakness for Megan and I was the time in which we left to set up and prepare our piece. We didn’t completely think about how long it was going to take to stick up 50 pieces of paper on two walls and write facts about us on it. We had been given twenty minutes to set up our living gallery before we had to go and warm up, Megan and I thought this was more than enough time, however, we were proven wrong as we did over run overtime. To improve this we should have maybe thought about how

long it would take us to create our set. Perhaps, we should have stuck our pieces of paper together first and then stuck it on the wall as a whole, to save some time.

We were tucked away in a small corridor siting on two window ledges and so therefore this might have been a bit difficult for the audience to see us and to come and view our piece. Because of this positioning, it was quite easy for some audience members, to walk past the small corridor and not notice what was happening, especially because we were sitting there silent most of the time. The window ledges were also very thin in width and high, which had a risk of us falling off them. We put two high chairs next to the window ledge to help us get up and down at ease. However we realised that there was still a risk of us losing grip on the chair or we could put too much pressure on one of the chair legs, so we decided to make it easier and safer by using two small step ladders to get on and off the window ledges.

As our piece was quite still and quiet, it wasn’t as attractive as some of the other exciting pieces, if I had the chance to do this again, I might add some dialogue or some movement to make our piece more attractive and inviting for audience member, However, I do feel like our piece was popular as it was different from everybody else’s surrounding us and people did like our piece, however I feel like more people would have came over if we added more movement or dialogue to our living gallery.

What will I take from this:  

I have learnt by taking part in the Living Gallery, that it is important to be specific with how we present our message. Because the word perception is such a broad subject, we wanted to particularly focus on views of people from the outside and inside, so I have learnt that it is important to make art clear for the audience but also have it open to interpretation at the same time. Also I have learnt that a living gallery takes a lot of preparation and it may take longer to set up the space then I thought. I liked working with a simple piece of stimulus and creating something of my own from the artwork we chose from the Tate Modern.

Comments:

“extremely interesting”    

“learnt a lot about the brain through our conversation”

“interesting way of putting the message across”

“the image we created was attractive to look at”