The Cultural Tourist

Little voices

Sometimes there is a natural lull in one’s art work. Caught between a mixture of wanting to try new things completely, to wanting to use my tried and tested methods to communicate current concerns. Ideally I should both.

My present dilemma surrounds 8 very small canvases I am working upon. Actually, its early days – I am still at the stage of playing with images digitally with the view that they are likely to end up on these small canvas squares. These works follow on from my squashed drink can migrant and refugee series called ‘Jewels’. These recently were on display in a UAL one night pop-up exhibition called PArt of Us which focused on the potential of creative ventures engaging with social issues (with special emphasis on the Calais Jungle.)

My new works in progress are focusing on the materials and patterns that the refugees wear, trying to emphasise the preciousness and uniqueness of each and every person by drawing out the vibrancy and detail of their clothing and material items around them, even though it seems the people themselves get lost in the pure volume and numbers we see in the media every day.

Using photos from newspapers as a starting point, I used photo-shop to hide the features of individual people and then digitally drew on the images to illustrate items of material. I found it to be an uncomfortable working practice eliminating the faces of people but that was kind of the point. I am hoping that the deliberate obscuring may in fact emphasise the opposite.

Anyway, my dilemma is to do with the fact I keep changing my mind in how I think I should approach these works from both a composition and technical point of view. I feel uneasy and unworthy of trying to communicate the magnitude and complexity of this political and emotive issue. These are very little pieces and it is with a very little voice I try to communicate. It mirrors the huge sense of powerlessness I believe many of us feel surrounding this.

In life, we all appropriate in some way – whether this is retelling a joke or copying a haircut from some celebrity. But in the process of appropriation, often the thing in question becomes personalised simply in that in comes from you. Your hair with that haircut, the way you tell that joke with the incantation and tone of your voice.

Art is certainly no stranger to appropriation. We are always influenced and informed by other art, events and sights around us so that what we produce as artists is some sort of assemblage from these encounters. True appropriation in art is perhaps more recognisable when an existing piece of art is used as the basis or in the make-up of another piece of work. In my latest series of works, it could be said that I have used other people’s work to help make up mine.

On a recent holiday to France as I was walking around the cities of Nantes, Le Mans and Orleans, I took a number of photos of bits of my surroundings that I encountered in this urban environment. My new work focuses on the graffiti and bits of buildings, foliage, shadows and reflections that I zeroed in on.

The reason I chose them was because there was something about the detail or the texture that appealed to me. As I took the photograph, I deliberately apply a subjective framing (as we all do when we use a camera) as it is the focus of this frame which has inspired me in some way. It could be the movement of the mark making, the rich colour of the object or the intricate detail that is displayed.

Using these recent urban photos as a basis, I created a number of digital montages, cutting and pasting, digital scribbling and erasing – a kind of a graffiti of the graffiti. I had certain ideas in mind as I was producing them. I wanted them to be evocative, collage like, reminiscence of walls, rooms and close-up details of the buildings around us – the patterns, the surfaces, the dynamics between structures, suggestions of the elaborateness of bits of architecture and a cross over between design and fine art.

It’s not that I had exact ideas of how I wanted these to turn out, I did know however the areas I wanted to explore. Broadly speaking these are the artists Tomma Abts, Franz Ackermann, Sonia Delauney, Richard Hamilton, Albert Ohlen, Fiona Rae and Anj Smith. It’s a long list (and certainly not exhaustive) but these canvases allowed me the space to have a bit of a play with certain elements these particular artists use in their work – so yes, even more appropriation.

However the works themselves start to take on a life of their own and entice me to follow certain paths conceptually and visually. There is no doubt I am lulled into a different place, perhaps even a different story in each of these and I allow myself to indulge accordingly. Contours, colours, shadows, memories, literature, poetry, bits of films drip feed into the work, loading it up, pushing the flow one way or another. In a way it’s a bit like a meandering river in the way that each work collects and builds up along the way to its own conclusion.

The attached images of my graffiti pieces are all work in progress so may yet change considerably.

It was April last year when I found out I was lucky enough to be selected for a Cass Material Arts bursary as being one of part of Made in Arts London’s (MiAL) featured artists. This bursary provided me with much appreciated Cass vouchers to spend on whatever I wanted within the store.

Over a year later and I am still benefiting hugely from this. Much of my work over the last 12 months particularly has been focusing on playing with more mixed media and different surfaces in my art using the material that I have bought. As one would expect sometimes the experimentation goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s all good and necessary when it comes to making art.

I have been focusing on a lot of small work; 8 x 8 “, on board – continuing to focus on corners, pathways and little wild bits of the urban environment that we might pass by every day. I have still been using digital photography as the first step of my process recording a particular scene which I then transfer on to the wood board. From here things may change dramatically. After ensuring the surface is ready to work upon, I have been using a mixture of water colour pencils, pastels and pens and oil paints.

Visually it is not a huge stretch in terms of difference between my previous processes and materials, but has allowed me to see the subtlety of variance in the effect of the materials. This subtlety mirrors that which I am trying to portray. Fleeting, ephemeral, out of the corner of one’s eye, texture, beauty and ugliness packed together in a kind of natural urban collage.

The surfaces are not smooth – they are rough and sometimes kind of gritty. Patches of gloss sit aside matt and faded markings. Brush, pencil and finger painting is evident. The original digital photograph acts a springboard or a trace of what is to evolve – the final piece of art being something that is deliberately not polished or perfect but a combination of reality and man-made illusion. Such is our world around us.

The following pieces are a continuation of my exploration of using mixed media and photography whilst concentrating on transitory moments of urban existence. In my head, they are a kind of utterance of modern impression – capturing a moment of time and light with photography and then further expressing the essence of this moment with digital drawing, paint and other mixed media in combination with the photograph.

Katherine Mansfield; a renown New Zealand modernist short story writer famous for her Impressionistic ‘capturing the moment ‘pieces – when I consider my latest work, it is her writing that is in the back of my mind.

“And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her.” – ― Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories

Blurred edges, hazy experiences, a wink of a moment caught as best as one can with words or in my case; images.

‘Apple Dapple’ developed from a moment of sitting in the garden in the summer sun, sleepily looking at an overladen apple tree with the light glinting through the leaves into my eyes.

‘The tree and the building’ stemmed from looking at a tree and its distorted reflection in the windows of an unremarkable looking building. It gave me ideas of grids, stained glass windows and cubism.

‘Shadows through the window’ grew out of a photo of a shadow of a tree through a semi-translucent window in an art gallery. The suggestion of what else there could be, the effect of the light and gestural capacity of impressionism is evident.

‘After the rain’ focuses on a patch of wild space with its glistening leaves and layers of weeds and flowers after it has been raining.

The final pieces here sometimes change quite dramatically from the starting point – I do not let the original idea I am try to capture dominate the proceedings. If it feels right to carry on working on a piece with mixed media that might ‘overthrow’ the initial concept, then I will do so. Other times, the final piece is very close to what I originally captured in the photograph. Concept and process hold equal status for me and I tend to instinctively play with these.