This project started in 2015. I was going through some mental health issues which seemed to be rooted in my childhood. Feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness exacerbated by the sudden decline in health of my mother. She passed away in December 2015. It was an emotionally complex event for me as along with the expected grief I was also angry and disappointed that I had never resolved certain things with her – in particular information about my dad who left when I was a baby.
I began using drawing in its simplest form to help express these thoughts and feelings – scribble and repetitive text images.
It then occurred to me that this had potential as the basis of an exploratory series of work as a means of expanding my practice and as a source of therapy.
The introduction of the 3doodler printing pen into my practice has been a great boost.
Suddenly I could actually draw my ideas in 3 dimensions, blurring the line between drawing and sculpture.
I then came upon the technique of drawing onto objects with the pen to produce 3d drawings/sculpture using random found objects, my sculpture and shop mannequins. This is how I produced Standing Infant – a fully realised 3d drawing that instantly became a haunting object.
I saw myself as a child in this piece and realised I was beginning to tap into those issues that were causing me so many problems.
The next stage was to photograph the sculpture in various environments which produced a series of intervention images.
They began to tell a story all of their own.
While continuing to work on the 8 figure sculpture for Flux Exhibition in July, I have also been avidly making drawings to compliment the sculptural pieces and to flesh out new ideas for the project.
The image of the figure will be used to produce a large scale print of repeated figures that gradualy fade (or disintigrate) from left to right. This is an image I have in my mind to show how memories fragment and vanish over time.
The gothic archway is a plan for a large scale sculpture (possibly 10′ in height) to act as a centrepiece for the eventual Drawing Demons Exhibition. It is inspired by Rodins Gates of Hell, a work that has been in my subconcious for many years. The major difference, aside from the lack of human figures, is that the door is open. It is the assertion that hell is a very real place and we are already living in it. Don’t believe me? All you need to do is check out the news around the globe AND at home.
This piece will test both my own commitment and metal as a sculptor and the qualities of the material.
Lastly, this final image of the foetus carrying an assault rifle will be produced as a ceramic transfer to be used in the next Artmonkey72 Freerange event. Keep checking back for more information on that!!
The ethereal nature of the figures allows them to interact with any environment and immediatley I got the sense of a ‘haunting’ from the pictures. This to me is not a ghost, but more a representation of my own inner child trying to gain attention. It reminded me of a repetative dream I had some time ago – a child hiding in my wardrobe, lights that would not function and christening gowns floating at the top of the stairs. Terrifying to experience but points to a need to acknowledge and begin to deal with long buried issues.
The process of making the work, a continuous extruded line of plastic, is a product of the mind being allowed to wander and the quality of line is affected by the direction and speed of the movement. It is like writing without using words. In a very real sense, the work is made up of my thought processes and feelings – harsh straight logical lines, curved more emotive marks and lines that work over previous marks like the process of overthinking issues.
The following link is a short video of the process.
https://youtu.be/7GPc7whb6aI
I began to think about producing a full scale installation of a domestic environment that the viewer could actually inhabit. To test the validity of the material I produced a dining chair using the same method. The trick with this is to leave parts of the sculpture open and disconnected in order to be able to remove it from the chair.
The results are very encouraging and will be moving on to doorways and walls soon.
During a particularly foggy day at the studio, I took the chair into the field to photograph. I was hoping for some haunting, unusual imagery and was not disapointed.
After reviewing the images one in particular stood out to me. Your presence lingers 2017 is a tribute to a friend who recently passed away. He worked these very fields for many years and was also an accomplished carpenter – making some high quality oak furniture some of which I have the honour of owning. It made sense that the ethereal chair sculpture represented his presence and though the image is somewhat sad, it also brings a sense of intimacy at odds with the landscape.
Along with this I am currently reproducing the child figure to produce a larger scaled sculpture/installation. Though the figure has the same source, I endeavour to keep them unique through utilising a random drawing pattern and diversifying the sections of the figure used.
The family of demons will only get larger!!
As good progress is being made (6 of 8 figures complete) on the figurative installation I am producing for #FluxExhibition 2017, this entry will focus on production drawings to expand the project.
The intention of this work is to produce pieces that describe anxiety and depression. To this end I have been making drawings of the technique used to produce the figures, as design ideas to make works using ceramic techniques.
These drawings were produced by loosely describing the form using the same motion as with the 3d pen. Using traditional drawing pens I completed the drawing using a humble scribble motion to make simple areas of tone which give the image a more 3D feel.
The images are produced firstly in a random fashion, then control to render the shape and finally a combination of random and controlled. Controlled chaos are the words that came to mind during production. These words accurately describe my struggle with mental illness – a cycle of chaotic thoughts followed by attempts to reign them in.
The drawings are also reminiscent of symbols or even characters in a written language (mandarin for example). Producing 26 seperate images in this respect would give me an alphabet which could lead to some exciting abstract text based work.
The next stage however is to make these forms in ceramic which is a subject for another entry.
