Wall Piece (Studio Exercise)
When we moved into the third-year studios, our first job was to repair and re-paint the walls – the degree show had taken place there a few months earlier, and most of the graduates appeared to have cut and run as soon as it was all over. Some had even left their work behind!
As it turned out, my studio wall didn’t need much work, so I sort of just sat around for a day, removing the odd screw for someone, or sanding down people’s hardened poly-filler.
I thought that before I changed the wall’s appearance forever, I should document it, and perhaps get a piece of work out of it. Anyway, I hired a camera and started photographing it, square on, up its entire height.
One of my interests is the cross-over, or layering, of representation over reality. I’ve been looking for two years for a piece of work that touches on the subject. I realised that I could stick these images together, in photoshop, and print it life-size, then drape the composite image over the wall so that I would, in effect, have a representation of the wall layered over the top of the wall, acting in place of the wall.
I even thought of a clever name – ‘Wall and Piece’ – but I soon remembered that pun had already been made by Banksy, so I shortened it to ‘Wall Piece’.
I knew I wanted the representation to be seen as clearly a representation, rather than something that was attempting to be the wall. This piece is not intended to fool you into thinking it is the wall, rather that it reveals itself as a copy – by virtue of it being a composite of different-sized images, surrounded by a white border. Also; there was also no way I was going to recreate the white of the studio wall in photoshop.
An extension of this self-revealing fakery is that I also photographed the floor, so that the image now rolls out across the studio floor, curling up as an effect of it being rolled around a tube while in storage.
I like the end result, and have had several positive tutorials around it, but now that it’s done – and it is something that I had to do, regardless of whether it makes it out of the studio – I’m kind of wondering which, if any, direction I can take it in now.
