A Conversation Piece

The first time I heard the school bell on my second placement, it shocked me. It felt aggressively loud. Three months later, I barely noticed it.

Without realising it, I had learned not to hear it.

A Conversation Piece emerged from my Art & Design PGCE placement and from thinking about what happens when attention becomes habitual, what we stop noticing, and what might happen if we allow ourselves to pause before deciding what something means.

The work is built around a single moment: the pause before interpretation.

The visitor enters a dark room. A school bell sounds. When it stops, there is a pause. Slowly, light emerges through hundreds of perforations made by repeatedly stabbing a cardboard ceiling with scissors.

The work began with a moment in the classroom. A student had started stabbing a cardboard box with scissors. My first response might have been to stop him. Instead, I asked what he was doing.

He showed me a small opening in the side of the box. Held to the light, the interior was transformed. What had first appeared to be an act of destruction became a way of making, a peephole, a patterned space filled with light.

That moment stayed with me.

Teaching made me think differently about attention: about the speed with which we interpret behaviour, objects and situations, and what becomes possible when we resist that first reading. Creative practice is always an unfinished conversation, between artist and viewer, between student and teacher, between the world we inherit and the one we are making together.