The Rubber Band Project, 1997
It began as a competition, to see who could see them first and who would collect the most.
On our walk to school, my son and I started to collect rubber bands. We began collecting them in the autumn, our attention was drawn to the ground, leaves were magically printed onto the pavement by the rain and the sun. At an early stage, I decided to work with the process of ‘photogenic drawing’, a term used by William Henry Fox Talbot to describe his earliest process ‘by which natural objects delineated themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil’. Inspired by the action of sun, leaf and rain, I decided to combine photogenic drawing with the historic printing process of the cyanotype, resulting in blueprints.
The journey became an event, of a repeated and heightened activity that took place on the streets. Each school day is represented by one print made with the rubber bands actually found on that day.
The ideas of this project determined the form and presentation.
In the maquette and wire drawings (above) you can see how it followed the daily pattern of collection and repetition that were determined by the structure of the school year. At the end of each day, our find was logged, dated and kept in an envelope.
The school year consisted of 191 days, and we found 1,272 rubber bands. Each of the 191 prints were made inside, at home, generally at night. The ultraviolet light source was a domestic sunbed, the prints were soft like a memory of the rubber band, mapping a narrative of our relationship.