I’m back! It has been a long time. I’m panicking.
I spoke last time about the work with the ballot box; it is something that absorbed me completely during the days I had free to work on it. I completely immersed myself in the project; I had other ideas I wanted to add to it but time meant I had to keep it simple and in the end, I think it was for the best. This was made and exhibited way back in Spring. It is proving even harder to find time for studio work since then.
I have never made an installation piece of my own work before and producing a print work of nearly 19 m long was a physical challenge. To see the piece installed was thought provoking, as was the content. I was satisfied that it was finished but not satisfied that this was an end point in itself; it has started a series of questions about the nature of my work, the nature of print, the nature of painting.
Fast forward to the present: since the ballot box piece was finished, I called it “The Mud and the Sheen”, I have been intensively involved in anti fracking activities, working hard with Frack Free Ryedale to prevent Third Energy from achieving their goal to get planning permission to frack in a village near where I live. I have found it extremely difficult to have enough clear “head space”, left for my own work, so I gave up for a bit and fretted. And fretted some more. In the end, I decided upon another list, to enable me to get things back into perspective and allow myself the time to get into the studio. In no particular order:
- Use the evenings for Fracking admin – emails, writing objections, research
- At least 3 days per week in the studio, keeping it flexible as things to do with fracking pop up at unexpected times
- Other days for domestic stuff, garden, friends, family
- Enjoy life, stop seeing it all as a series of jobs that need to be done
- Draw
- Draw
- Read
- Draw
Title: The Mud and the Sheen*
The narrowness of the strip of Chinese paper comprising this print emerging from the ballot box resembles toilet tissue; the analogy between politics and our ablutions appealed to me. . .
We are rooted in the mud and filth, yet always aspire to the stars, to better things. In trying to achieve this, we should always be mindful of the unseen, the un-included, of those worse off than ourselves. Life is nothing without repetition; it provides the framework from which we take off into the unknown joy of it all.
*Quote from Timothy J Clark’s essay, Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction, Reconstructing Modernism, Art in New York, Paris and Montreal, 1945-1964. Ed: Serge Guilbaut, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusettes, London, England.
This piece comprises a decommissioned ballot box that I have etched with Nitromors. A nineteen meter lenght of Chinese paper, about twelve centimeters wide with a variety of print; Screen, relief and mono. Simple imagery referencing the force feeding of suffragettes, quotes about democracy from a variety of authors, tally marks, asemic writing and my own thoughts. I am planning on exploring these formats and ideas further.
