Real/Non-Real

Some more images of the process in action…

I’ve been making real/non-real images for a few years, using bits of mirror, polythene, lamps etc to concoct little world that become real when I photograph them. I dabbbled with more world-damage using collage, but the little lines made by the scalpel are annoying, and anyway recently you couldn’t move for Baldessari/Stedaker derivatives.

Instead I made a collage from an image mixed out of some paper circles in a kaleidoscope, the gas-heater guard in my studio and some oddments, and decided to reverse the process and make real things out of these pretend-world images.

The results have been very exciting (to me anyway). I’ve been making randomly generated sculptures on a fairly big scale from studio scrap , setting them up in a quick-fire series of assemblages.

I got the chance to try this out in a large scale during the Manchester Art Crawl earlier this year, at Kraak gallery. I took a couple of ‘fireguards’ and ‘kaleidscopes’ and extemporised the rest, using bits already in the gallery – a door, a nice wall for painting on, a mat etc.

I did the same a couple of weeks ago at PRISM in Sheffield, explaing what I was doing to the audience – I liked that!