Metal
It seems natural for me to choose etching as my medium for this work. Many of my ideas come out of the materials and processes of etching. I love the 19th century technology of it and the substantial, material quality. It can seem close to sculpture as you remove and transform metal and press it into paper. I love the heaviness of the metal and the blackness of the blacks. It is also dirty, poisonous, physically hard and repetitive. So it seems a very appropriate medium for work inspired by this industrial site.
I decided to use a steel plate to represent each pane of glass. I have been doing a series of drawings of broken glass windows on drypoint plastic and also using shards of glass to create prints on steel plates. These have all been done by tracing directly onto the plates at real size. I would like to do this with this window, treating it as a found object to make the work from, but the practical difficulties of reaching the top of this 7m high window mean that I will have to work from photographs. However I do want to make work real size, to maintain its presence, even though that means it will be difficult to display it in one piece.
