Something new stuff we’ve been cooking up involves creating our own football shirts. We’ve begun to incorporate the fact that there are two of us into our recent works like ‘Sid and Jim vs. The World’. Since it’s inescapable that what we do is governed by how we do it, harnessing and shining a light on that aspect feels only logical. The football shirts are another ‘team’ style system; they’re how people distinguish between someone they share something with and someone they don’t. It also draws a comparison with a uniform, it’s distinctive clothing worn by members of the same body. However, unlike a school uniform, which is forced upon the wearers, this uniform is worn with pride, not distain. It’s interesting that the first evidence of coloured shirts used to identify football teams comes from early English public school football games. Something that originates with the upper class is now far more synonymous with the working class. As the game gradually moved away from being a pursuit for wealthy amateurs to one dominated by working-class professionals, the kits changed accordingly. The clubs themselves, rather than individual players, were now responsible for purchasing kit and financial concerns, along with the need for the growing numbers of spectators to easily identify the players, led to the lurid colours of earlier years being abandoned in favour of simple combinations of primary colours. Basically, the shirts look the way they look because of the people who wear them. This means that, at some level, they’re personalised. They’re valuable to each person for the same but also totally different reasons. They make the universal, personal. That’s something that can be very often missed in art. A lot of artists make autobiographical work; ‘I’m from Germany and I make art about being German’, ‘I’m disabled and I make art about being disabled’, ‘I’m black and I make work about being black’. Something that’s very difficult with this field is how relatable is it; making work which is fairly self-involved can be problematic when other people are viewing it. Art is a pretty great tool and is only limited by the user so to confine oneself to only dealing with ones own issues seems slightly strange to us. A football shirt is an accurate metaphor when attempting to make something that appeals to many for a reason, also appeal to one for a different reason. It’s also fun to consider us as a team but it’s assumed if we were we’d be on the same team as opposed to rival ones. Like in ‘Sid and Jim vs. The World’ it will appear that we are competing with each other; shirts for team Sid and shirts for team Jim. The teams would be five-a-side to reflect our amateur status. The shirts also tell a story; was there an event? If so who won? Who played on whose team? We’re constructing a story using visual prompts to jog a memory or thought.
This is similar to another idea we’ve been thinking about involving a coffin or tombstone. Something or someone has died and we know that because there’s a grave in the ground to mark it. It arises from a quote by David Eagleman’s book ‘A Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” So a gravestone used to be the way that you would never die because as long as your name is out in the world, you’re alive. The Internet, especially social media sites like Facebook, has increased this improbability of ‘death’. Prematurely creating our own gravestones is an attempt to create an alternate reality where we actually have died. Why would there be a gravestone with someone’s name on it if they haven’t died? There’s also a lot of ‘stuff’ that comes with death and this isn’t to do with the dead person because they’re dead, funerals are for the people who have to deal with the fact that they’re dead. This is the same; the item is being made for the people who are alive. However, the people who are alive are also the people who are supposed to be dead.
We’ve also been photographing empty storefronts of jewellery shops. There are all these elegant shapes and beautiful colours to hold and match what is on display but if there’s nothing on display, they become change. We are left wondering whether we’re looking at invisible jewellery or if it was been purchased or stolen. What is the story behind the missing objects?
