By Alfie Souter

1.

Since this is my first Scab I thought would be dramatic to just stick a 1. as the title! Haven’t got much to reflect on at the minute, nor am I sure what your meant to do in a Scab so I thought it would be best to just talk about the scholarship competition. 

My initial thoughts about SCA were all highs of great ideas and the fun of unravelling briefs. I didn’t consider the fear and imposing nature of the blank page. I had never experienced it till trying to come up with a good answer to these briefs.

The blank page, the blank computer screen, the blank post it notes all seemed to tell me I’m not ready. I decided to research and literally vomit anything I could think of onto these pages. The stroke of brilliance I wished for, for both briefs still alluded me. I decided to look at the past winners. Joe Sare and Olly Wood’s submissions in particular stuck in my mind. Both take a simple idea and execute it in an amazing fashion. For both their effect on the real world is their most impressive trait. The ability to not only think of a great idea but galvanise the uninterested public into playing along. 

My initial dilly dallying was caused by my waiting on that ah ha moment of an idea I thought could win the competition. But in fact, the basis of one of my submission ideas simply came from clicking on an origami video I saw whilst procrastinating and thinking it would be fun to do something with origami. The process actually started happening when I eventually stopped trying to think of the best idea ever and just develop the ones I already had. From this I learned how important the development phase was in creating good work. For me anyway it helped me to realise that I did have some good ideas despite my immediate dismissal of them. This became a critical part of the process for me, a book I read recently talks about reminding yourself of why the idea you are working on is good. Doing this helped me not lose faith in what I was doing. 

I started on the ‘Hometown heroes’ brief for this was more of an undertaking. Beginning with a call to a post office on the island of Colonsay to try get some information about when the tides would let you cross over to my desired destination of Oronosay. Mike (I think) was quite helpful even giving me the numbers of two of the four inhabitants on the island. They were somewhat more suspicious and needed some convincing, inevitable questions followed – Who the hell is this? How did you get my number? Eventually they agreed to meet with me and were very kind when I went up there, giving me a lift from Colonsay and all talking to me for well over 10 minutes each. As well as offering tea afterwards. Whilst the ‘Teach them a lesson’ brief I did all in one day, though practising making the origami hand did take a fair few tries. I was surprised this submission made the shortlist but Dan was telling me it often happens with work at SCA that you can spend weeks on something and it be trash but spend a couple hours on something and it be brilliant, which I thought was bit of a mindsplosion for most of the work I have done so far in my life you can make good simply through hard work. I guess that was an interesting lesson to learn from my submissions.

Alfie out.