I decided to mount and display my paintings on a white wall partly because I wanted to compare how they all looked with plain white backgrounds, and partly because I wanted to consider where I had got to.
I had two new ones to include in the display, both on the medium weight 90g tracing paper. One painted with water soluble oil paints and another with watercolours. This second had looked like a poor composition with the telegraph pole in the middle of the painting, until it dried and a tear opened down the pole, almost dividing the image in two – it suddenly worked:
The water soluble oil painting was not a successful composition either on first sight, but the rich depth of the paints and their deep colours made it exciting against glass.
Because most of the paintings are on tracing paper, I used fixers that held them slightly off the white paper mounts for all of them, apart from one very large pastel which was on white cartridge paper anyway. This meant that light could filter behind and through the tracing paper images a little, and also that where the tracing paper had split, its shape was not compromised. I photographed the group display, and all the individual images. Here is a selection:
I was interested to see that most of these images looked much brighter and, in the case of the tracing paper ones, more lively shown this way. I think this was partly because the white backing bounced light back through them, and also because the little bit of space between the tracing paper and the backing on a bright day meant a little shadow was cast within the pictures. Individually most looked more ‘finished’ than I expected, and I realised they would look good mounted in box frames. The two new ones were typical of this enhancing effect.
However, the small images looked rather lost on the big white wall, and the tracing paper ones looked less interesting than when shown against the windows of my studio space, or projected. I think that if the wall were crowded with these images, it could look very different. I only had three of the ‘telegraph pole’ images, but showing them with the ‘engines’ pictures made both look more exciting, and I realised I should keep going and also expand the number of different frame sources I am using. This might make a good wall display eventually!
I had also been hoping to incorporate my work in an installation. This project is about the emotion behind narrative, and I have been considering the strong sentimental feelings that affect perceptions of family ciné film screenings, and the personal narratives they incorporate. The rolls of images and repeated viewings, with their layers of versions of stories and the almost ritual or emotionally symbolic act of watching and remembering/retelling made me think of worry beads, rosaries, or charm bracelets. I thought I would try to make some kind of chain with the images that captured this idea – maybe a string of light boxes would work?
I wanted to make as many as possible as a quick prototype, so I used plastic vegetable containers, painted white and a string of white christmas lights to make a chain of light boxes. Then I used masking tape to gently attach the tracing paper images that looked interesting together, and fitted, to the boxes I had accumulated.
The dark space was free, so I was able to try out my prototype installation and photograph it. I only had six useable boxes, which was an awkward even number for a laid-out chain, so in the end I decided they looked best as a dropped chain – hopefully the photos show what I mean! It also seemed to be a good way to represent the tumble of narratives I think are provoked by the ciné films.
This could grow into a much bigger more substantial installation, but for now, I am pleased with it. I was not sure about the extra lights between the boxes, but actually they hide the rather shabby prototype boxes, and their extra twinkles in the pitchy black space actually give a merry feeling to the installation which mimics the nostalgic anticipation and excitement of watching the old ciné reels in the dark, and revisiting sentimental old stories. The mix of paint finishes of the paintings and thickness/transparency of the tracing paper makes the images look far less alike than they do when displayed on a white wall, or even against glass.
Something to remember! My prototype may not do as a permanent structure – even using LED lights that are designed for safety, my plastic boxes and paper images got ominously warm during the its time lit in the dark space. If I make a permanent version I need to use something more heat resistant to make the boxes, and carefully fixing the lights so they can not come into contact with the paper.
This has made me compare my tracing paper images again with Francis Alys’ work, and I realise I want mine to do something different. I’ve looked into Matsui’s assertion that Alys uses his figures repeated poses as fragments that work like Walter Benjamin’s allegorical symbols to create “a tie, a shared life between the works.”, and that this reinforces their “certainty in one’s mind”. I think that rather than emphasising one central connection, I am making repetitious images from the same source in different ways to highlight the different truths and narratives associated with them. This is one reason I was not happy with the images grouped on a wall mounted the same way in a unifying arrangement. Making my installation using a variety of boxes arranged naturalistically, as if they had been dropped, kept the images individual within the grouping, highlighting their different qualities, and made each appear to communicate its own version of the original frame’s narrative.
At last I have harvested more lost frames to extend my slideshow. It is displaying them at 1 second per frame in this one, rather than two in the earlier version, which I hope makes it more lively and obviously related to flicking film frames, while still enabling the individual images to be seen easily. At normal speed these are all apparently invisible. It is getting more interesting. Click here to see the new slideshow.
