Art by Design

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in terms of writing proposals and coordinating an upcoming exhibition. But amid it all I’ve finally finished my new piece ‘Oracular Spectacular’, a wall-based artwork that merges consumer packaging with traditional framing. Here are some images, documenting its stages of development and construction.

To get myself out of the computer-based habit of constantly being able to hit CTRL-Z and undo my actions, I sketched the initial image in ink (as opposed to using only pencil) as a means of committing to the picture & not over-thinking things. Only towards the end did I cover up & redraw a few parts that I didn’t like or that I felt should be changed.

Once it was done, I photographed the sketch and began the ‘flip flop’ process (described in my first post) by stitching the two halves of the artwork together in Photoshop, making tiny adjustments and printing it back out on paper. After this I transcribed the image onto cardboard via a process of embossing – then colored it with acrylic paint, which I applied using Uni-Posca markers. Finally, I covered the whole artwork with varnish to seal it all together.

After this I performed the crucial step: I created a box (made of similar metallic cardboard material as the artwork itself) to contain the work and hang it on the wall. The acrylic imagery was protected behind a window of PVC plastic, similar to the way perfumes and chocolates are packaged. Rather than framing the artwork in a traditional way, I wanted to stay consistent with my emphasis on packaging and consumer-based display methods.

The iconography brings together several ideas and themes I’ve worked with before – including Grail mythology, T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland, Masonic imagery, and Tarot card symbolism. Other iconography & text in the piece are derived from video games (esp. Super Mario Brothers), Dr. Seuss, the art of Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and David Hockney, and the music of Velvet Underground. These are all remixed together into a kind of contemporary hieroglyphic language that covers the inside of this ‘gift box’ shaped artwork.

This is my first hand-made piece in quite a while & it does have a different feel than my digitally-printed artworks. Also, it’s much smaller than the sculptures I’ve been creating to date. Making big, intricate sculptural forms can be quite addictive…so it’s nice to break the spell and tackle a smaller, simpler piece. It’s been a challenge to get to this point, but so far I’m satisfied with the results…

I realize, looking back at my previous post, that I didn’t describe what I actually do. While my artist’s statement is at the bottom of this blog page, I’ve found that one of the best descriptions of my work was provided by Louis Tuckman in an article in Culture Vulture, who playfully described what I do as “psychedelically religious sculptural homages to materialism.”

That seemed to capture both the ‘conceptual’ and ‘fun’ aspects of my work & it was a real pleasure to have somebody describe what I do (rather than always having to be the one to write about myself in the form of Artist Statements, proposals, etc.).

Louis wrote that article in November as a review of the Open Studios at Patrick Studios in Leeds where I’m based. That was the end of a hugely busy year for me, as I was completing a Canada Council Project Grant (funding a new series of sculptural pieces), and had been exhibiting in several shows, including Sampler in New York, Vantage Art Prize in Leeds, Click + Spill in York, The Independent Artist’s Fair (TIAF) in London, and Collision (Nancy Victor Gallery, London).

I also had my first international solo show – at ReTramp Gallery in Berlin – and took part in my first international residency: Ethnographic Terminalia in Chicago at the Washington Park Arts Incubator.

Beyond my solo practice, I also collaborate with another artist, Julien Masson, with whom I make large-scale sculptures – including a commission in Winchester in October/November for 10 Days/Creative Collisions. This was followed immediately afterwards by Quay Arts’ Duets Open, which showcased one of our new Perspex sculptures. Most recently we opened a new exhibition of our collaborative work at The Point in Eastleigh. The show, called Level Up, includes several of our 2D and 3D pieces, including a new sculpture commissioned by The Point, designed digitally and made from laser-cut Perspex and vinyl. It is open until April 2014.

Now that the show has opened, and some of the big projects from 2013 are all finished, I’m excited to get back into my solo artwork creation. I’ll post soon about the progress of new artwork. In the meanwhile, here are some images of previous projects. Or, please see my Facebook page or website below for more portfolio pics.

www.iankirkpatrick.wordpress.com

https://www.facebook.com/iankirkpatrickartist

I recently read an article by Robin Sloan (http://www.robinsloan.com/note/flip-flop/) called “Dancing the Flip-Flop” which describes the practice of creating artworks, images or videos that were formed by an exchange between analogue and digital mediums. An example of a flip-flop would be:

1. Making a drawing

2. Taking a photo of it

3. Opening the photo in Photoshop and modifying it

4. Printing the modified image and physically drawing on it with pen & ink

5. Scanning the new artwork & posting it online.

While this act of moving back and forth between analogue and digital is something I (and many other artists and graphic designers) do in their everyday practice, reading the article made me more aware of the process & how it impacts my work. I realize that I ‘flip flop’ all of the time…but with an increasingly strong bias towards the digital. Whereas I previously used the computer as a small part of the process of creating hand-made sculptural pieces, I now use the computer almost exclusively – only using hand-sketches in a preparatory way…then finally at the very end I return again to the analogue world when I print and assemble my artworks. In other words, my practice has become almost completely computer-based.

This transition happened during a Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant I won in 2012. The project specifically involved an exploration of digital tools, in order to experiment with links between packaging design and contemporary art. There were clear reasons to work digitally: scale is flexible, changes can be made quickly – and images can be repeated, distorted, and adjusted much quicker than creating them by hand.

However, the move to digital began to estrange me from the manual aspects of my work – and it began to worry me that I might never again be able to interject hand-craft back into my work. I missed the physical act of creating art – the mess, the success of making a perfect mark, the unpredictability of materials like inks and paints.

So…I’m going to take a half-step back into the ‘analogue’ world again and create a new series of artworks that use the best of both realms…and see what happens. This blog will be a chronicle of my experiments and inevitable failures – as well my thoughts regarding intersections between contemporary art and design practice. Please stay tuned…

www.iankirkpatrick.wordpress.com

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https://twitter.com/iankirkpatrick