For us as a group to generate ideas to boost engagement with the art and the exhibition, we had to first know and understand the pieces that were going to be included in the exhibition. When we began the project we were given a list of works for the exhibition, we used this to research and analyse some of the works. This then gives us a platform to use some of the pieces as inspiration in the idea generation stage. 

We began with works included under the Past and Present theme, this theme takes the artists perspective at a certain point in time, we focused on a couple of specific pieces when analysing the theme. Tracey Emin, The Simple Truth, 1995, Grayson Perry, Map of Nowhere, 2008 and Gavin Turk, Cave, 1995. Were big inspirations during the ride generation stage. These three pieces, in particular, were looked at because the underlying principles can be transferred over to the exhibition. 

Gavin Turk,  Cave, 1995 commemorates the time the artist spent at the Royal College of Art, decorating the room where the art would have been. The plaque reads; “Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989 – 1991”. The emptiness of the space and the plaque becomes art itself, this concept was carried over in an initial idea of imitating the plaque by visitors giving them the chance, to sum up, their own experience at the exhibition, creating art themselves. When examining Tracey Emin, The Simple Truth, 1995 a fabric piece created around Tracey Emin’s view of America it is a defiant yet positive statement towards her work and America. We took very literal inspiration from this piece by incorporating a fabric-based activity the visitors could personalise. 

Similarly, with Grayson Perry, Map of Nowhere, 2008, this piece comes 12 years after the previous two and has a very different style, but that comes mainly from the artists rather than the time. Grayson Perry focused this piece around the idea of no Heaven, “No neat ending for life”. He started drawing in the top left-hand corner and started drawing without any planning, personally I see some reference to The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, 1490  which shows the promotions of man. This could link to Grayson Perry capturing his own “proportions” in this piece. The illustrative nature of this piece gave us inspiration for visitors to illustrate themselves in this style as part of an art activity.

The photography of the exhibition has been a focal point for the group throughout the project, specifically Sarah Lucas’ works. Overall her collection of works for this exhibition has a “grunge’ quality to them. This feeling is the total opposite to what we thought of when we did our mood boards of the 90’s, they included lost of bright colours etc whereas this pictures of real life create a much more down to earth experience. I think this may create a much deeper nostalgic feeling when visitors of a certain age see these pictures and reminisce about their own life in the 1990’s. 

Finally, another piece that really stood out to us was Bedwyr Williams, Walk a Mile in my Shoes, 2006. 

Unlike any of the other works, it had an interactive link to the artist, as well as slight humour as the shoes are all size 13 as that was the artist's size. We linked this piece in some of the design work used for the snapchat filter project, using shoes as visuals. 

Overall the pieces analysed provided great inspiration for us to carry forward throughout the project and researching the artists and the pieces gave us insights required for producing our concepts, for that reason it was a vital part of the process.

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- Elliott