is an evolving site-specific installation based on construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of an expanding lexicon of objects and assemblages. The process is rooted in one prototype collage that I make into actual objects which I assemble onto each site. I bring some basic materials, and make a combination of pre-made and improvised objects in response to the site. The process triggers an endless renewing string of ideas.
Just getting packed up to start residency at Modern Art Oxford on Tuesday – even in the act of packing I get sidetracked by new combinations of objects – see photo. Just upturned the frilly papery thing I made the other day and it went sort of shaggy dog on me.
I love the way modular working produces results that are generated by the physics of the material and its ‘behaviour’. Just make a form, make lots of it, and see how it stabiliuses itself.
ANNOUNCEMENT – OFFCUTTER HAS BEEN SCYTHED – HENCEFORTH IT IS REAL/NON-REAL.
– same continuing project though, but now with ACE funding it’s going public next Tuesdayand the conceptual concentration is on the optics aspect.
This photo shows where I’m going to be working for the last two weeks of May – the deliciously old-fashioned Museum of the History of Science in the middle of Oxford.
Eeek- crazed relative just appeared, more later.
Am I alone in taking up to 2 working weeks to fill in a funding application? two waking weeks I should really say, as much of my pondering happens at 4am – good ponders, I think of these insomniac episodes as studio time.
But happy with new little objects based on mathematical objects/optic things.
Visited the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford on Thursday to discuss the residency I’m doing there in May. The director’s office in a steep climb to the summit of the building, a tall room with inky curtains whose pelmets half hide the cupola of the Bodleian Library next door. I remark how awful to be overlooked and he sighed, acknowledging that it cast an imposing shadow and was built before Wren had really got into his stride.
How distracting the moors are as you go towards Manchester on the M62! The road’s high and fast, and rises and falls around you like a roiling ocean. I was on my way there last weekend to take part in Word of Warning, an ‘Emergency’ event where I was putting up Real/Non-Real (the current manifestation of OffCutter) at the Castlefield Gallery.
The idea behind my work was to make a tabletop landscape of small sculptures, assemblages, mirrors, moving a camera through it so an image of the journey appears in an adjascent screen. I turn the camera on its side, suddenly drop the lens down, swirling the viewer around.
It turned out that when the camera ‘looks’ at itself on the screen, it goes crazy and behaves like an image in an infinite reflection, mutlipying and echoing its form. Gorgeous!!
There were lovely artists to talk to, and I had a wondrous time.
Living and working in Norfolk at the Queen of Hungary Project Space. MA at Norwich School of Art 1997. Projects include 'British Bulldog' performance, co-founder of 'Sinopticon' with Eliza Gluckman and Gayle Chong Kwan, 'Real/Non-Real' at Modern Art Oxford. Painting since 2014.
