When I Grow Up – Installation by Olly Rees

text by Ceci Mourkogiannis

Olly Rees doesn’t want to be an artist. ‘In fact,’ he says,  ‘I was so rubbish at art back in school that I dropped it as soon as I could. I really can’t draw at all’. True as that may be, Olly’s self-proclaimed lack of hand-eye coordination certainly hasn’t stopped him from livening up the Cambridge visual arts scene with a series of quirky, interactive art initiatives. Over the past year, Olly has treated Cambridge residents to a variety of user-friendly projects, which have included a breakfast delivery service, an outdoor Memory Tent filled with contributors’ personal memorabilia, and an exhibition featuring anonymously submitted photos taken on free disposable cameras.

‘I like working with contributions from the public’, Olly explains, ‘because it stops me from looking pretentious’. Olly needn’t worry. To be honest, he probably wouldn’t come off as pretentious even if he stuck a Parisian beret in formaldehyde and exhibited it at the Saatchi gallery under a pseudonym. Whilst found object art and user-generated installation pieces are liable to induce unfavourable associations with Emin overkill and herds of American Apparel-ed foundation-art-schoolers, Olly’s insistence that art should engage people, not isolate them, is characteristic of the welcoming atmosphere his projects create. To some extent, Olly’s work is a product of his concern that people see modern art as ‘too dangerous and too self-indulgent’. Olly continues, ‘Cambridge is full of unbelievably intelligent, focused people. But when people are too focused on just one thing, it sometimes means they tend to view art as a luxury. It is, I guess, but an important one’. As secretary of The Shop on Jesus Lane, one of Cambridge’s only public-art spaces, Olly is keen to raise the profile of the visual arts in a city where theatre and literature have traditionally been given pride of place. 

For his latest project, When I Grow Up, Olly is compiling a physical archive of peoples’ memories, images, stories, fears and dreams on the subject of coming of age, which will be exhibited in The Shop later this term. Anyone who wants to be involved will be given a nifty little When I Grow Up Kit – a charming packet filled with enough envelopes, tracing paper and stationary-based goodies to thrill even the most over-eager Rymans enthusiast. Participants in the project are asked to doodle, snap and write about their past, in an attempt to capture what exactly it is that has made them who they are, or who they’d like to be.

A psychology student at Jesus College, Olly acknowledges that the concept of When I Grow Up stems from his interests in mental development and personal identity, ‘I find it amazing that we’re all so similar, at this base level. By asking people the same questions, you see that everyone shares the same fundamental worries and dreams. I was talking to a medic the other day, who told me that scientists can more or less locate the precise part of the brain where memories are made and stored. The idea that you could hold something physical in your hands that partially defines who someone is, well…that’s definitely something, isn’t it?’

If you’re interested in getting involved with When I Grow Up contact Olly @ or244@cam.ac.uk

To find out more about The Shop visit: www.theshopjesuslane.co.uk

and if you’re interested in having a look at some of Olly’s previous work, go to www.oliverrees.co.uk