Sophie Ashdown

On the first day of our low residency week, we had a session with Alex Shorey who is one of the most energetic and enthusiastic people I’ve ever met.

I was somewhat perplexed but intrigued that he announce at the beginning that the day would be all about “holes!” My mind whirred with what that could entail but I couldn’t have guessed all of our activities.

Alex showed some photos and videos of different types of holes. Eg sinkholes, holes in the ground, caves, etc. He mentioned that holes are often described by what’s around them rather than the actual hole which I found intriguing.

We did an exercise where Alex placed his phone on a turntable where we were supposed to be still as it passed us. However I thought it was on selfie mode so I was moving at the wrong time! Doh! The resulting video was still good if you ignored my mistakes.

We had large A2? sized pieces of cardboard into which we were asked to cut a large hole of any shape. Most people cut circles but some cut more unusual shapes. Mine was supposed to be more geometric but turned into a multi-pointed star which I was fine with.

The task was to take out cardboards out into Granary Square (the area in front of the CSM building) and when Alex made a ding sound we had to stop for three seconds to “frame” something within the holes in our cardboard. It was actually good fun, especially with a group of tourists staring at us bewildered with what was going on.

More bewildered still were the staff at Waitrose as Alex led 30+ people through the store, stopping to frame their produce at various points. I doubt that the fresh produce at Waitrose has ever been so popular!

Eventually we went back to the room and were tasked with creating something that could be viewed through our cardboard hole, that had some kind of movement.

I went with a constructivist themed collage with an elevator style piece that went up and down. Stupidly I forgot to take a photo of it but I quite liked my creation.

Alex got out his camera and turntable again, which were used to film us in a circle, moving our creations behind our circles. At first it seemed like a crazy idea but it was fun to do and the resulting video was really good. There were some wild and crazy things waving around behind those circles!

Our last task of the day was to construct a cardboard structure to hold our phone and a photo cut from a magazine where we had cut some type of hole in the photo. I found a great photo of a man wearing big sunglasses so I cut out the sunglasses to use as the “hole.”

We ventured outside onto the roof terrace to use our contraptions to take videos and photos. It was fun to see everyone wandering round filming different outcomes.

At the end we lined up our phones together and played our videos. Alex shot his camera from above which created a fantastic birdseye view of all our videos at once.

Overall it was a really interesting day but I admit I was exhausted at the end. I haven’t spent that long in a classroom environment for a long time. The session was super fun and energetic, which took more out of me than expected. I went to bed early that evening!

Thank you so much to Jonathan and Alex for organising such a brilliant day.