Hereford College of Arts

The next image is small – A3 – and on paper.

I find working much larger gives me more freedom and room to manoeuvre. A small piece doesn’t get space to develop.

I have decided to leave the making of hundreds of art-cut-from-newspaper cups, mostly because my motivation for doing that was to create an immersive piece of art. I was getting carried away with the process, rather than making sure what I was doing was right.

Thinking about what I need to do now (this was a while ago when hardly got online) I came to the conclusion that what I need to do now is explore the world in paint as it is so responsive.

I have been painting using what I know as the Paul Thomas method of painting – starting with mark making and then bringing forms out as and if they emerge and letting the painting evolve in this way. The first new one done in this way is lost.

After making two attempts at the mobius strip made with moulded cups – one where the material was art cut from newspapers, the other simply newspaper. I have found that I have over-complicated what I am doing. Again, I cannot see the wood for the trees!

The material gathering process by going through newspapers and cutting out art is a long one, and it does take a while to gather enough material to make 25 or so cups, but I am getting something from it.

To proceed, I need to find a way of gathering more newspapers for my raw material. So, I am asking librarians to save old newspapers (they often hold current newspapers), I could do the same with local cafe’s and I’m considering delivering a note around to neighbours asking for newspapers before they go into their recycling bins. I need the least time-consuming way to gather this material or order to have enough to work with.

All this is so I can make 400 or so moulded cups because i would like to see what might result in me covering a room in these cups. I haven’t decided whether they might be arranged in orderly rows or in the flowing manner of my previous arrangments. I have a feeling it’s goint to be the latter and I cannot wait to see what happens!

I am going to need perseverence to sustain and achieve this, though the steps I have to take are simple.

While talking to Matthew Day I’ve found he’s interested in the form of the mobius strip and so I ‘ve decided to use that as a form to play with by combining it with my cup moulds.

I wanted the cups to all be facing one direction so they flow.

For my first attempt I used my latest moulded cups – which are made out of art cut from newspapers and magazines. I used a strip of old blind as the base for the mobius strip form and glued the cups around it. This has ended up with the cups coming away from the strip and looking like a formless pile of cup-forms! I made the mistake of making the gluing permanent (using a glue-gun).

My next attempt I did today and used light cardboard to make the form of the mobius strip and (being safe here) stuck the cups on with white-tack.

I am keen on using art cut from newspapers as my material, but making them into the form of cups and then putting them around a mobius strip is far too complicated.

(Summary of what I’ve recently been doing )

We mapped the college & I focussed on where people interact the most = the cafe… I observed and then honed in on the disposable cup and made it repeatedly to represent people having drink together…

Then I’ve done a selfie version – with my own receipts (visa bits torn out)…have now run out of those. Now I’m making cup moulds with images of art – exept I didn’t want to just search for images and then print them out -too contrived, plus I wouldn’t discover much. So I’ve been going through newspapers and mags that are about to be recylced, to take out art images. (Of course, while I am doing this I’m filtering out what I think isn’t art and vice versa)