Last Sunday was time for the annual Art Car Bootique at Chapter Arts Centre, organised by Something Creatives. Chapter Gallery commissioned me to do a stall and work with the idea of ‘Guilty Pleasures’ which I turned into an offer for people to come and confess a guilty pleasure for me to draw.
It was interesting for sure – most people wrote theirs down and hid it in an envelope for me to draw later, but a few brave souls sat down and in confidence and spoke out loud about their guilty pleasures. There were lighthearted ones and darker ones:
- Eating biscuits in bed
- Playing Football Manager
- Peeling skin off your legs and feet
- Roadhouse
- Mad baking often at night and drunk
- Star Trek (“this is how the world should be”)
- Star Trek vol. 2: Captain Picard’s lines (“Make it so”)
- Enjoying traumatic and violent nightmares
- Randy Savage (!)
Even when the weather turned bad for a while people still kept coming… and I got busier and busier…
Guilty pleasure bunting! What’s your guilty pleasure? @_auralab #ACB2013 @chaptergallery #guiltypleasure twitter.com/ctangle/status…
— catherine angle (@ctangle) April 14, 2013
In the end I had to stop receiving confessions and just stick to drawing them. Some people collected theirs on their way home but others will be posted to their correct owners in the next week or so.
There is a special magic about providing a space to interact and have a conversation with someone you don’t know very well – sometimes it helps people express opinions and thoughts they couldn’t say out loud in front of family, friends or colleagues. This type of participatory work is something I have done with the Come To Your Senses project and Mearcstapa collective – more details about that soon too. In the meantime do get in touch if you have ideas for a participatory project with visual facilitation or just to say hi.
