Banal decoration, obsessive compulsive behaviour, art interventions or plain rude?

These are the questions I pose to myself as we start intervening with the space of someone’s home who we have never met and who will not be present for our planned stay and project time here. It all started as we first started to colour code all the products of the bathroom, creating a crazy organic sprawl from pure aesthetic intuition. I’m not one for the art of just aesthetics but as Graeme carefully arranges a mass of clear turquoise glass stones on the window sill, I felt sickened to think that there are people who would meticulously do this in the name of decoration or ostentation. Or was this reminiscent of a obsessive compulsive disorder that required these actions to happen for the sake of sanity. As I sat on the toilet looking at Graeme’s further rearranged shelf of objects, they can be seen as corresponding with each other through their shapes, sizes, colour etc, or a meaningless coincidental placement of objects, but one cannot help but think of the strange order of these things, that they are without a doubt deliberate and then one wonders what for. We have decided to keep this strictly as the order of things and it is interesting how it dictates how we interact with a space.

I have also been intrigued by whether our actions are interventions or intrusions. I could not help but feel that I was breaching someones’ privacy and treading tenuously the line of being impolite, whilst I scourged around for trinkets and jewellery to lay out neatly on a throw, displayed as if for sale in the entrance corridor. We have been given free will of what to do here except for any irreversible effects, but there still seems to be an unwritten rule of what is acceptable and what is not. As well as exploring this relationship, my desire is to highlight objects that one in life accumulates and to question and re-look at what one possesses. The works also reflects my experience of being a visitor in this particular scenario, comparing and associating with different peoples’ engagement of an environment.