Today i am in Hamburg and what was the first thing i did – investigate whether there were any good photographic galleries.
Actually Hamburg is the home to the Deichtorhallen, one of Europe’s largest art centres for contemporary art and Photography.
So of course I had to investigate. Three things really caught my attention. The first was walking to the cloakroom there were several tables with coloured pencils white a4 paper, wrapping papper, scissors, sticky tape, magazines, and glue. The second and more serious was a series of front pages newspapers documenting the Sept 11 attack on the Trade Centre in New York. I was amazed at how many different angles the photographs came from. And, the third was a series of photographs of people at each age 1-100. Of course i wanted to immediatly go to my age person’s portrait. I wonder how many other people think the same. The other interesting thing about the last twenty aged 80-100 most were female in fact all but 3 were women. Seems us women outlive you guys.
On heading back to the cloakroom i took more notice of the wall of results behind the tables of paper and pencils. There was some amazing stuff some obviously by children – some more sophisticated. So i spoke to the guy behind the counter – he advised that the featured artist had left it there for people though mostly children to contribute. Well i saw wrapping paper and got itchy fingers so i asked if it was ok to do something which received a positive yes.
i sat at one of the tables letting my inner child out all by myself in a gallery in Hamburg. So for 15 minutes i was oblivious to everything around me as i created my usual wrapping paper art of the shirt tie and jacket. Just as i am finishing – someone sat close to me and i looked up and around and the table behind was full of other adults working on their master piece and the table i was on was also filling with cloak room headed passer by’s. So i was not the only one who was drawn in by the paper pens scissors etc.
Interesting that it took someone to do what most are thinking.
So i walked away with a smile and a unique experience. OH and if anyone visits the gallery during this month (March 2013) look acrros the bottom row and look for a single white page with pink shirt and blue jacket made of paper.
