Following my last post, I am back in the studio making.
I’m using waste paper, mostly the brown paper of the type used to fill the void in parcels. I’ve got people saving it for me.
When I have done a batch, I then make a vessel to contain them. I now have about a dozen of these vessels hanging on my studio wall. Alongside a few extra large ones that are hanging independently.
While the pillow cases full of wrapped real twig “children” were being installed at one gallery, I delivered a vessel full of paper twigs to be installed at another. This second is a new gallery to me, so I was unsure about what to submit. So I thought the work in progress paper twigs were the way forward, less risky because I don’t have that emotional connection to them. Maybe I will, but at the moment I don’t.
So in my head I obviously have a hierarchy of materials. These don’t matter because they are not real twigs. They are imitations. Even though a couple of people so far have thought they were real, until they handled them.
At the moment, to me, these twigs are only about their materiality. I’m working with the signifiers, but don’t yet know what they are signifying. Or maybe they won’t ever signify anything. Maybe they will always be just paper wrapped in linen.
In other thoughts, and in another post, I wonder about telling people what these things are to me. Do I have to inform the viewer of the significance of the pieces? Can I just put it up there and let them decide? Either they have their own ideas about the meaning, or they can just enjoy the materiality, unfettered by any emotional content foisted onto them by the artist. I have actually myself been put off works of art when I have them explained to me.
Aesthetically, these two works are similar … twigs in pillow cases, or “twigs” in “paper bags”. I’m not fed up of making them yet. It will be interesting to see when I do, how many have I got, and has any sort of meaning turned up? At the moment I can’t imagine getting upset about them getting damaged… but who knows… they represent an awful lot of time, even if not materials.
