Danger

I am plotting what to do about Danger. Specifically, an exhibition called Danger which will take place at the Rag Factory in Brick Lane (?) and which my friend Kate is curating. She has been kind enough to invite me to show some work at the exhibition, which I'm quite excited to do. The last time I exhibited in London happened to be in the same area, at the Truman Brewery, as part of Free Range 2008. This was something of a sequel to our degree show, and in my case I feel it rather suffered as a result, since I for one felt so drained by the degree show experience, and daunted by the idea of racing to put up another show, that I really didn't make as much out of the Truman exhibition as I could have done. This time I intend to do better!

I've managed to spend a few hours in the Hertfordshire Central Resources Library this week - where I now want to live - the idea being to research what angle to look at the theme of 'danger' from. I've found a book called The Encyclopedia of Horror, which is mostly about the kind of horror film I most like, such as the old vampire/werewolf/zombie/monster ones. I've been thinking and writing notes on the different kinds of danger that exist, or don't exist as the case may be, and dividing them into 'everyday' - e.g. tripping over a shoelace, 'extreme' - things like natural disasters or severe but plausible catastrophes, and 'fictitious' - the kind of things that only happen in films, etc. I like the idea of mixing these around, in some kind of narrative.

But I seem to keep coming back to the idea of eggs. They are what I seem to think of as the most at-risk of everyday objects. I've made a video about eggs before, as part of a showreel I made in my final year at uni, and which was included in my degree show:

I'd like to take it a bit further this time, and set up some live scenarios, based on horror/adventure narratives, for the eggs to attempt to deal with. I need to decide whether the eggs would be as they come (raw and potentially messy), blown and hollow, or re-filled with something else.