- Venue
- Nottingham Trent University
- Location
Dan Ford’s work is situated on two walls. The first is painted a sticky green lemon yellow, while around the corner the wall remains white. A magazine page is stuck to the yellow wall where a woman advertises an indigo jumper. In the aged advert the woman poses with hands on her hips, from her elbows inwards Ford has stuck two diamond shaped patterned stickers. A two-inch scrap of this same pattern is repeated further along the wall. It is below and to the side of a wooden diamond shaped block. Strips of wood have been buttressed up against one another to form the diamond, the front has been worked to produce a surface ready for painting, yet the small block is left unpainted. Along the sides on the bottom of the block, green stickers with a leaf like pattern are placed and they curl slightly against the wall.
On the white wall we see two more paintings; another diamond with another green leafed edge and a rectangular painting. Ford’s works seem very precise and clean, yet a drip of brown paint, unfilled screw holes and a patch of colour tests leave the installation seeming unfinished, as though parts have been left forgotten or abandoned.
On the very edge of the yellow wall at the bottom, two pieces of masking tape have been left. One curls around itself and another juts out from the wall. Bending down and inspecting these pieces of tape, a quarter circle of paper reveals itself, stuck to the back of the smaller piece.
These pieces of masking tape along with morsels of paint left on the wall, ruler drawn pencil lines and some unused screw holes can initially give No Title the appearance of being hastily cobbled together and left unfinished. However when we inspect these unfinished parts closely, we notice deliberate elements about them. Their status as art objects is adjusted when we find a great depth of considered laboured work.
Pencil lines are geometrically drawn across the wall, extending the shape of the paintings, screw holes have paint within them, and the composition of what appears to be a forgotten colour test is repeated in finished works elsewhere. Ford doesn’t want us to consider the elements of this installation singularly; he wants us to forge relationships between the segments. He presents a work made up of works. They can be considered individually, but together they musically repeat motifs, shapes and patterns within one another and also the architecture within which they are situated. We might see that a rectangular patterned red sticker stuck beneath a window just leading in to a third wall, has the same edge ratio of the window above. If we stand in the right place red bricks fill the window and another repetition emerges.
In the Degree Show list of exhibitors and works, he is referred to as: ‘Dan Ford, No Title’. On each wall Ford has labelled his works with hand drawn diagrams and title lists. He seems to dislike Untitled opting for No Title instead on more than one occasion. He titles the magazine page piece No Title (for Joan of Arc). Ford toys with titles by titling one of his drawings with another drawing. Number 4 on the yellow wall is a smaller drawing warped into italics of the drawing it refers to. So is this pencil written list of words to be considered as a drawing too? By doing this his visual language absorbs the situation of exhibited work and a conflict regarding labels is incited. It is up to us to decide what it is we are now looking at.
For this review to remain a review, that is, a piece of text which describes and assesses, I have to use words and only words. If I were to include a diagram instead of words at any point, what I was making would bypass being considered an illustrated review and become something else. This drawing of the drawing as a title successfully challenges the insistence and habit language has of labelling things and asks the viewer to consider the parts and the whole. It suggests perhaps that the title is unimportant. What Ford wants us to do is to look again and to look harder.
