After having a lecture about trace artists last year it occurred to me at the beginning of the year to collect each piece of paper that I have cut out, almost as a negative space idea.
Over all this time I have amassed quite a hefty collection in a multitude of colours of pieces of paper and stored them in this little box.
I plan on displaying a huge pile of paper in my degree show as symbol of a trace and the amount of piece that I have had to painstakingly cut out each and everyday. It acts as a reminder of the amount of work, dedication and effort goes into my work and how much time and effort also goes into it too.
I experimented with silhouette work inspired by Kara Walker in my work and attempted to do so in the dark room in our university.
I ran into some issues when attempting to document the silhouettes. To create the silhouette was much more difficult than I thought it would be. It had to have a strong enough light behind it, be close enough to the wall and all at the same time as taking the picture.
Since I didn’t have four hands I have to do a lot of setting up and working on timing in order to achieve any semblance of a silhouette.
Another issue I found was that my flash kept going off, blurring out the silhouette completely from the pictures as there wasn’t enough lighting in the room to stop the flash automatically going off each time. Because of this I had to switch cameras and finally could take the pictures.
The picture quality isn’t amazing due to the difficulties that arose during the experiment but it was interesting to see the cutout as a silhouette and to experiment with what the light could look like shining on the cut out and through it also.
One of my pieces had unfortunately been broken by someone putting their foot through it when it was residing on the floor and tearing a piece approximately 15 inches long across it with their foot.
This gave me the idea of repairing it, but just not quite like before. I had spoken in previous blog posts about experimenting in interweaving, but weaving different coloured cut outs together. This felt like an interesting way I could use this idea without destroying another piece of work.
I feel like it worked very well, although it isn’t immediately clear that the piece has been tampered with and inter woven until you look closely. When the piece is help up it becomes much clearer as the paper layers don’t separate as they have before, instead staying seemingly stuck together. The overall effect of the interweaving is definitely understated. Most viewers would assume that it could separate into different layers just like my other designs.
I used normal pritt stick glue as the glue didn’t need to be particularly strong when so many areas were glued together and I also needed a material that would dry quickly, transparently and wouldn’t be obvious as I felt that it would unnecessarily draw attention to those joints in a way I didn’t want.
While the obviousness of the joining would make it more clear with a different sort of glue, I also thought it would weigh it down if it was glued with a hot glue gun glue, although it would dry more quickly, and I couldn’t use pva glue as the drying time would be too long, I would look control over how much glue would be on each area, but it would have dried transparently.
