Works on Paper : Collaboration 1

Val Bolsover

Sharing

In childhood we are taught to share, the expectation being that others will share in return. We may have fewer sweets initially but our generosity should reap rewards in the future.
We use sharing to relate to joint experience. However I draw the line at the notion that we can share a book with children. In my literal world this would necessitate cutting it up and giving each child a few pages.

So now I find myself in a project where both uses apply: we share our work by giving it to be cut up or used in whichever way our co-collaborators choose. We do our best to play nicely with our new friends and share the experience of creating new things.

This first month has been really interesting. I suspect Lindsay and I have made things we would never have happened upon alone. We have been stimulated by the work we received and the drive to bring together Niki and Ros’ work in something new resulted in more ideas than we could possibly pursue. So we played with the ideas separately and together until we found avenues we wanted to follow. But the work also has a voice and we found ourselves diverted further by fresh observations.

I am looking forward to seeing what has happened to my initial pieces, and how Ros and Niki respond to what we have done with theirs. But looking forward I wonder who I will be working with and what we will be given to share for the next month.

Alison Berry & Sonia Griffin:

Using the works by Ruth Payne and Val Bolsover as a starting point, it has been a challenge to develop ideas that incorporate both as they are so different in visual appearance and in concept.

Concentrating on manipulating their physical shape we have focused on two structures shown: a tower shape derived from Ruth’s work and wave-like signals from Val’s work. Parallels between the tower structure and historical architectural examples in literature such as the Bible have been pursued. Combined with the wave-like signals the theme of communication has become dominant in our new collaborative piece. Beginning with paper’s fundamental role as a medium for communication we have explored the explosion in contemporary communciation and posed questions about this.

Lindsay Connors:

Progressing the idea of indirect markmaking we have been experimenting with a series of photograms, inspired by the images, objects and marks that we identified in the works from Ros and Niki. Here are the results of a few sessions of experimentation in the darkroom. I feel they are starting points, and the perfectionist in me wants to push them further.

There is a certain degree of directionless play that has to go on without necessarily reaching resolution. As a teacher of Art, I recognise the importance of this , and have to remind myself that this is ok and in fact necessary. It happens all the time within my own practice.

Sharing this with a new collaboration partner is new ground. Its a bit like organising a ‘play date’, with the accompanying negotiation about what to play, and what the rules are.

I am learning to recognise that what happens in the studio together does not necessarily result in highly ‘finished work’, but instead opens up new possibilities either might not ordinarily have considered.

Ruth Payne

Picking up from Ros Barker’s awesome baking parchment scrolls, featuring figures traced & drawn from magazines/newspapers, I’ve made a pierced figurative tracing on the same medium.

These are photos of the parchment held up to the light of a window. There is a mysterious quality to the images and the figurative image starts to break down as the photos become more close up

January 30th

First meeting with Ruth Payne in a coffee shop between our two homes, sadly we live quite a distance from each other.

Karen Gardiners work involved fine red lines ending in a template silhouette of the base paper, delicate and beautiful. All my thoughts revolved around RED. I have never actively selected to draw or wear this colour. It has connotations of power : Political: labour and communism, red official wax seals.Education the teachers red correction pen on school work. Religion, the authority of the church of Rome. Implications of passion and sex or love, red roses or a ‘red letter day’ The passion of anger, ‘seeing red’

So apart from the obvious red paint, ink, biro, wax crayon, pastel does it come in a more unusual format? Well yes it does so for my first meeting off I headed with my new red drawing implement and a red biro for each of us. Notes made at the meeting appeared to have significance in their strong red scrawl.

Ruth has Sonia’s work which comprised three independent ideas. We both felt drawn to the three dimensional curls of cut unadorned paper. The shadows in the coffee shop were stupendous.

I had felt Karen’s piece was crying out for an intervention but felt loath to alter its simplicity and elegance. I feel very responsible for it as an art work and am wondering if she has concerns for it? While being told the ‘letting go’ is part of the project, I do wonder if the artists will always be able to comply, can we create an artwork knowing it is going to be altered or potentially abused? There is of course also the potential for another artist’s improvement or resolution.

After an hour and a half brainstorming we are going to explore an amalgamation of the two works involving: Red media. Scale. Qualities of paper. Silhouettes, templates and shadow. Qualities of mark.

Just been told by my MA Drawing Chinese Peers that it is the year of the Horse and Red is very lucky this year!

February 13th

My thoughts have revolved around qualities of paper that will respond independently when cut and therefore alter any preconceived outcomes. I am also interested in amalgamating my current MA investigations into traces, shadows and absence. Red media is the only confirmed aspect of the experiments.

I selected to work on baking parchment because of its texture, that it is more cloudy than tracing paper creating a vague obscurity. It has a definite engineered commitment to retain its curl and it comes on a very long roll. I cut the width into three vaguely equal portions.

Two intensive days later I have ‘Culture Trace’ Red biro on baking parchment a continuous 4 metre paper work which has self selected itself to strongly resemble a Chinese parchment scroll. The piece is figurative and is a collection of mixed size images partly traced and drawn from two months Sunday Times Culture magazines. The only limitations were that the figures be full lengh and fit on my 15cm wide roll. This actually limited my selection of imagery and I tried not to compose the parchment but work through each magazine in turn. The figures cross all cultural and interest boundaries, musicians, cartoons, book jackets and paintings feature amidst celebrities and historical photographic imagery.