Ross:
Richard and I have been talking about this project for a few months now and slowly things are begining to take shape. When I recieve his work in the post and install it in an abndoned house it will be the first time our work has occupied the same space.
We are both in transitional stages in our home lives. Richard recently moved to Edinburgh and found a new studio, and I am currently undertaking an internship with the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in rural Aberdeenshire.
How has this affected our practice? Both together and individually? I guess I can only speak for myself but I’m sure that this experience is changing the way I look at and undertake my practice. The abandoned houses project was arrived at through circumstance; the circumstance of location. The most recent work I am producing for Richard was also arrived at through my circumstance.
I had been asked to complete the painting of a family crest, cast in aluminium, that now sits above a fireplace in an Aberdeenshire castle. An interesting task in itself, but I was asked to use small tubs of humbrol enamal paint. Like the ones used to paint model airplanes. This put me in mind of Turner prize nominated artist George Shaw. He uses these paints to depict his home town coventry with a sense of melancholy and loneliness. I admired his scenes from a passion exhibition at the DCA in early 2004. At this time while in 1st year Art School I myself painted landscape scenes. I never used humbrol but I remember trying to get that same sense of emptiness that Shaw manages conjure.
I left landscape behind before the end of Art School, but I always feel that my more recent practice had some link to this practice, and I have once again been thrown into this thought by a tiny pot of paint.
At SSW the landscape is prominent and the imagery rich. Photos upon photos of past project and people working are in SSW it makes me think of my old practice.
I’ve passed on some images to Richard to show him my thought process and I have began to paint from them. I suddenly remember why I moved away from this and what my restrictions were but I will persist with it for now until I get an image. I will post my progress on here soon but for now I will leave you with an image of the paper package I carried home the other night after painting. I thought it looked rather nice.
Another result of circumstance perhaps?
Richard:
My ideas are a little all over the place at the moment and, as I begin to back up some boxes of material and dismantle my trusty Ikea desk, I think of how my work might benefit from being around that of others in the same space. Something worth thinking about as I am to move in to my new studio in Edinburgh this week.
Different versions of a visual language in one space. This is something Ross and myself have been discussing recently. We are thinking of a direct collaborative piece that cross-divides both our uses of visual language, in one particular space. Ross’s abandoned house in Aberdeenshire has a room in it, a room in which a piece of his own work is already installed (I have touched on this house before, but not the room in particular). In the same room, as soon as I get round to posting it up, a piece of my work will also be installed. This will be the first physical outlet for our work in a given space. Not sure anyone will visit it there, but that is besides the point, its actual existence there, next to his, is more important in the instance: the conference of both languages will also be revealed in this context – a bit more of a conversation as it were…
So to these photographic pieces I have entitled ‘directories’: I thought I had better explain them but first, I shall enunciate Ross’s initial response to the images I sent intially to him as an email attachment: “I thought they were direct reflections, some sort of physical mirror image..”
Nope, they are simple cut and paste elements taken from photographs of floor-based collages and collages made just above and resting on a framed picture (which was salvaged from my partner’s friend’s general waste bin), using the same objects. The collages were cropped digitally to a square format, four of them. They were then cut from and the ‘cut’ circular element was pasted on to the next image – producing a direct relationship – that could indeed be seen as a reflection. Or a reflection of their very making? Perhaps… I am not sure.
These collages will end up as installations if we get the space.
For now they exist here and soon they will exist, printed on to cartridge paper, in the ‘abandoned house’ too. So the story unfolds. And meanwhile we return to the same pattern.
Ross:
I haven’t posted in the last week or had much contact with Richard. I’ve been tired and sluggish and not very productive. Perhaps a consequence of my weekend in Dundee perusing the recent degree show and DCA openings. Being where I am (The Aberdeenshire countryside) I don’t get the chance to see much art in an exhibition context so Dundee was a welcome change.
Richard says I map out my drawings, which I do. This is a recent development and something I was hard pushed to do before. I would fall out of an idea and not push through. I’ve since realised that to finish a drawing and then discard it is better than discarding it half way through.
My drawing has been sitting for a few days now. I look at it and wonder if it worthy of this project. Doubt begins to creep in. I’ll get past it but this normally mean that after this drawing, the system I’ve used recently will be shelved, at least for a while. I’ll have to find something new.
Richard has adopted some of my patterns into the interior of his drawings. This makes me think that a wall drawing might be appropriate. Even a floor drawing. We must create the interior of the exhibition space before we place our work.
We wait and wonder.
When Ross comes online (we both have googlemail accounts) I jump on him like a beast and fire questions to him about his weekend, what’s he been doing, is he surviving the ash cloud so far north of Edinburgh – has he made any work… is he making more than me? Alas he does not answer, his working situation is quite different to mine. He works in an office along with, I am fictionalising perhaps here, along with the rest of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop gang: chin wagging productively. Me on the other hang, my working is subject to the coffee pot that sits next to me on the kitchen table – I am succinct with the editorial work I do, but I do this remotely and often alone with little but the wind and Jazz FM to keep me going!
This past weekend has been a calm enough for me… less actual work replaced by workings out, or thinking, or concept building – Ross seems to be able to map out his drawings and also perhaps his thought process… my process has slightly more give and take, putting down leaving alone, returning and taking away – being synonymous with my eraser as an extension of my reductive goal. My drawings are getting lighter, last Friday I discarded one drawing that I thought might have been complete: I decided it was very much over-worked… too much ado about nothing much at all – it was confused.
What shall happen to this drawing then and is it fit for exhibition? I was thinking of sending this actual piece up to Ross for him to present in an odd little show he’s putting together making use of an old abandoned building – addressing its permanence in the environment and the possible longevity of an ever-lasting exhibition. A mini-collection for a ran-shackled house, perhaps reminiscent of some form of domesticity… something like what is depicted by the French animators who put together 2010’s The Illusionist maybe. This is all guess work.
But back to this drawing Ross. It is definitely overloaded – but now it contains this history… and perhaps this history is validated by your curatorial goal for the ‘house’ aforementioned. I will post it up to you. Along with some other things I reckon. Perhaps with some building blocks enclosed too… or some form of related object.
THE DRAWING
The drawing again depicts a form of partnership and also feature my house mate’s cheese plant that rests on the window seat of the front room. The partnership is overloaded with the notion of ‘fight’, there is a struggle and perhaps this is for a common goal – but the fact is there is no evidence of this goal within the actual drawing itself. Perhaps it is just a formal goal – a goal to find form. Not sure.
This is now a direct and immediate response to what Ross has just written below:
HOW PARAPHERNALIA APPEARS IN DRAWINGS TOO.
A drawing, started last night, has been completed today. It now takes first look on my website for current visual projects. It is a pencil drawing of a man (possibly the artist, in fact me) balancing a plinth on its side – shaped like a lozenge – in his right hand and holding a rod like stick in his left hand. On his head he wears a hat made from a fan found in a Christmas cracker.
This Christmas cracker was pulled at the same party, no less the same table, which Ross too attended at the end of last year. So you would even say that our curatorial model began to set itself even then. And our artistic relationship is in fact interrelated.
The man looks to his right to the other side of the room. There, on another plinth properly set on the ground, is a fish bowl containting a round shape. This round shape being an object that now sits on my book shelf, in my bedroom, on the southern side of the Meadows in Edinburgh. Behind the plinth held by the man, is a plant. This plant is taken from a wedding invitation sent to me by my causin who lives in London, and who works for Loreal as a hospitality manager. He is marrying a women in the canari islands later this year.
In the centre of the picture is a source of light that is controlled by an opposing character set to the forground of the image. This character is quite possibly a cross-dresser, her hairy forearms covered with black gloves.
Another partnership unravels with yet more story, yet the formal aspects of the drawing lend themselves to myself and Ross’s collaboration – diamonds really are a transvestite’s best friend. And Cilla Slack herself would back that up for me Ross!
In homage to Ross’s use of diamond shapes in his drawing process, and the appearance of the lozenge in mine, I show you two versions of the same drawing, one affected by graphic the other left to its own devices. Spot the difference.
