For the last umpteen months I have been collaging and transferring my photographs onto found materials. I suspect I will continue with this aspect of my work if and when I come across suitable and interesting materials to work upon. Then one day as I was clearing out my studio I came across scraps of paper and sketch books with bits of my doodles, sketches and collages which in themselves didn’t really amount to much, other than they were subconscious outpourings from a few years ago These artistic detritus I realised were also a type of ‘found’ material which I could further explore and work upon. Copiously photographing these items I set to work using Photoshop, cropping and digitally manipulating these to my heart’s content. I feel so pleased with the results I feel like I have cracked open Aladdin’s cave in terms of the liberation and potential this gives me going forward. To an outsider this may seem rather an exaggeration, but this new venture not only remains true to my practice (be it in a reverse kind of way), but it also excites me in the perpetual iteration of the work – it both turns in on itself, but also leads to a kind of divergence.
Time can be a funny thing. When you are not looking, it just slips by as if nothing, yet it can be such an important factor in the creating and making of things. I have been working on quite a number of items over the last couple of months, none yet really complete. My Urban Desire series continues on and to be honest I think will pop up now and then in the future as I come across something. The 2 pieces I display here began with photos within the city of London, a place I worked in for many years. I have always been intrigued with the grid-like approach of the Barbican buildings and I played around with this idea of pattern repetition montaging it with images of flowers. I think of all the energy and buzz of activity of the people and events when I think of this.
The other is a typical city landscape and street scene which includes the Gherkin building. My digital montage/painting plays around with ideas of the evening, lights, grids and ideas. It’s a bit science fiction looking. Baubles fall from the sky as if as snow. A bit mad really. I don’t suppose many people see the city of London as a magical place – my experience of it mentioned in the art world, is that people tend to grimace – I can understand why, globalisation, fat cats, and all that. But there is a magic to it too. It can be exciting, and stimulating and full of people from all walks of life working there. Both these pieces sit on found wood from a skip – they are kind of a memory and imagination blast.
I have also been working on what I call my Scavenger series. Taking this idea of using found material and in many cases actual rubbish I pick up off the street, I have been montaging and painting on these items. Squashed drink containers represent commercialisation, hopes and dreams reduced to a flattened existence. Damaged hub caps reveal broken journeys and wanderings as well as glimmers of potential opportunities. What is critical in all these works is that time has played an important part – memory for the city pieces, and the actual physicality of the objects being bashed around on the street set against the difficulties and possibilities and dreams of the cities inhabitants.
The seas of Hiroshige cross the canvas in suggestion.
Driftwood bare on a beach on a stormy New Zealand day. It looks like a deer, peaceful but definitely dead.
Scribbles in the sand reappear as technological repetitions and painterly crawlings.
Digital meets the physical mark, imagination meets memory.
Where am I going with this? It is as so…
The contradiction of the weight of loss and hollowness one feels.
The acceptance of what could never be.
Those last few days were difficult. I felt the absence before it had even begun.
Why this, why bother?
I remember during a tutorial at art college a while back, a ‘pure painter’ tutor uttering those rather cruel and devastating words…’why bother?’. I decided to take this as a deliberate and provocative stance to test my mettle in respect to the critical thinking of my work and process.
Yes, that I can answer. My background (be it many moons ago) is IT. I used to work in a project based IT environment, as a business analyst/consultant helping the business deliver their IT solutions. More often than not I was the middle person in-between the techies and the fast paced business professionals so as a result I was used to taking many different perspectives at once. In my work I use to think and breathe from both the aspect of the users and the developers; from the tiny bits of detail (which may have served a very specific business function) to the ‘stand-back’ overall strategic viewpoint of the very senior management in addition to the business and technical infrastructure in which the IT business application sat. I can sense your eyes glazing over…
This may sound exceedingly tedious and completely unrelated to art, but it is relevant to me. The interconnectedness of things, between that which can be achieved through the computer and the hand, the patterns apparent in hardware and software and in both the technical and physical painterly processes that I use, the way in which they sit and operate together, the standing back, multi-perspective viewpoints and the ‘diving right in’ personal interpretation and response. The structured and analytical working alongside the imagination as a dynamic and creative partnership. All of this is thrown into the fray when I make my work.In the words of Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ and in the words of me ‘therefore I do’.
