wood chip investigations…
Right so I pasted two defunct objects under said wood chip wallpaper with kind of interesting results; I didn’t expect the folds to be quite so rough nor for it to be so photographic. I’m sure there is a way to do it beautifully, a bit like wrapping a present. But the paper is so easilly torn there is no give in it.
The first photo is of the de-bobbler and the second is of a dead pen. Looking at the photos now I think they would make more sense taken at a distance, perhaps with a strip of wallpaper mounted either side… The folds in the paper tell a narrative and maybe they are worth looking at in isolation.
wood-chip wallpaper
Wood-chip is the cheapo wallpaper that’s been in use since the 1920’s to cover all sins. It has been described as the enemy of mankind due to the virtual impossibility to remove.
This got me thinking along the lines of:
hiding, disguise, concealment, pretense, falseness and lies…
It would be great to write out lies onto wood chip. Then I thought about the confessional, but really people/ strangers (or anyone for that matter) wouldn’t want to write out a lie they had told. Perhaps it is more subtle to know why someone had told a lie.
Wood chip covers up the damaged and imperfect. I drew a broken de-bobbler machine and found the effect on the mark making interesting. But, much more interesting: paste broken objects under wood chip paper.
I’ve found an affinity with wood chip wallpaper. I think I’m drawn to it because of it’s associations with questionable taste (?) and that it’s often used to cover up a host of imperfections on a wall. It’s also a blank canvas on which to paint.
Attempting to draw onto the surface throws up a crop of issues – lots of tiny little wood chip bumps restrict any great detail but I think that is a great benefit, that’s the character of the medium.
Initially I’ve begun to make some really basic drawings, just shapes to begin with, exploring texture and possibilities. The idea of physical resistance interests me… I will be looking at resistance and the contextual setting around wood chip wallpaper to try and bring these two areas together.
Life is ridic. busy right now, no time to do anything!!! Really all I’ve managed to do for ages is some doodling and a bit of clearing up.
I was doodling on some post-it-notes last night in a spare five minutes and came up with a few new areas to explore. It fascinates me how idle drawings could lead to something exciting.
Using found bits of paper I traced around the contours to produce some sparse, abstract shapes. Thanks mainly to the size of a post-it-note, there is only room for clarity.
I found a tiny ball of wool and poked my pencil right through it and started drawing, the wool restricting the marks. I pulled out a loop of wool and drew inside it, again the wool restricting the scope of the marks. It was like a woolly spirograph.
I pulled a strand of hair and tried to draw against its length on the paper; it kept moving. After 30 seconds of this the marks were quite beautiful.
It seems restriction and resistance are useful tools to record the untangiable.
vintage wallpaper
I’ve been thinking about wallpaper. I wondered if it would be interesting to use a strip my height and draw an image right about where my eyes would be. Grounding the drawing to a home scene I started looking around the house, at nooks and crannies, places normally ignored, seen but not seen: corners in rooms, cracks and thresh- holds.
I’ve discovered that these types of images are particularly bland and I’m wondering just how to handle them. I envisioned drawing but now I’m leaning towards using tracings from photographs.
