Richard:
Ross, I like your sense of line, especially pink line.
I have just received a well received email from Ross with images attached that document my four photographic collage pieces in situ at ‘Abandoned House’. The work looks good and the colour of painted walls and ceiling matches the colour-way of the photographic content – and here referring to Ross’s comments an my work below – a little bit of my working process, enclosed within a snapshot/collage, is now embedded ‘permanently’ in to the same location as his work in Aberdeenshire. The location of the Abandoned house is, and I hope will remain, unknown to me. There’s something interesting and accomplishing about sending your work off in the post and getting back a photograph of it in another space miles and mile north of your studio.
I remember putting these images together in accepting that their permanent state in a holy, damp and dishevelled house. A permanent collection indeed, but not as far as the conditions go – give it a few weeks in to autumn and there will be nothing left of my oil paint, my photographs on cartridge paper and my private view cards turned over-leaf and used as backing for the collage. The idea may stand the test of time but the works themselves will not. I like this dichotomy – it dispels any preciousness in the work and accepts that the work itself is fleeting. The work itself is therefor a catalyst for the collaborative exercise?
So, I now sit here in my front room, looking north in fact to Fife over the river Forth and up to the clouded hills. I type and I respond in some way to what Ross has written below. I also anticipate a package in the post enclosing some of Ross’s work, which I will mount in my studio alongside my own work. A library as such of ongoing process, a place for reference as well as progression.
I have also just polished up an old steel frame that I do not mind being damaged or rusted by rain and by damp in the coming months of autumn and winter. The frame encloses another collage, this time multilayered: first a drawing on newsprint paper as backing, then another PV card turned over-leaf, another two photographic collages, an old drawing in pencil and coloured pen on old non acid-free paper lined with red squares (sourced from my Grandfather’s old house). The old drawing is similar in shape to Ross’s find during a sculptural trail near Scottish Sculpture Workshop. Next to this drawing, on the same paper, is a fine liner drawing of three leaves taken from the cheese plant that sits behind me.
