FROM STATEMENT FOR OPEN STUDIOS 2013
It helps, every now again, to do a bit of stocktaking - reassess the journey, clearout the storage. A recent visit 'home' to the States, where I was born and raised, kick-started a new spate of this activity. A lot of work got shredded beyond any possible link to its perpetrator. Some 'surprises' have been lovingly rewrapped, and, for the future benefit of humankind, or my funeral pyre (or both!) put back into storage. Others, hovering in purgatory still required another go at resolution, absolution, or just more dialogue. Amongst a stock of things, squirreled away, were a collection of aluminium foil trays, used for many years to mix paint, and hundreds of vinyl gloves, worn to protect my hands - not from the staining of paint, but to avoid the solvents and detergents that would have been required to clean them after.
I had retained these things because there was something intriguing about them: as objects accidentally transformed through association with the process of painting, and, because they clearly bore witness to - recorded - a history of my activity, that in many ways, the 'finished?' paintings obscured. Consequently, I thought, that one day, they might become the building blocks, the links, to something else. So, taking them out of their boxes, and only partially dusting some of them off, I set about constructing the two main pieces presented here.
Originally, I intended to cover an entire wall with trays in a graded spectrum - starting with red or yellow on the left and finishing with green or yellow on the right. As I laid out the trays on the floor in colour groupings, to assess what I had to work with, two things became apparent. Firstly, that I didn't have enough trays to cover the entire wall with the density I was hoping for. Secondly, there wasn't enough parity of colours to enable the kind of progression I had envisaged. Though I did eventually concede to the production of a very small number of new plates, I did not want to distort my resources and their 'witness' by doing so - or altering existing plates by painting them further. The plates, as they massed on the floor, took on a kind of amoeba like structure that I tried to 'pin' to the wall, and the rest developed intuitively.
The 'platform' resolved itself more quickly, which surprised me. Its resolution is, to some degree, due to it being more sparingly covered - allowing for more integration or engagement with its surface and structure. However, I had less of a plan for it than I had for the wall piece, which, conversely, unfolded very slowly ,and at times, painfully, over quite a few weeks.
The platform is a kind of mobile stage, a processional vehicle, built for another project. Rolled out on several other occasions, to make various presentations, it was intended to be steered into different spaces, settings, environments - a stage within a stage, a play within a play. In this case I wanted the trays to act as cladding, perhaps a posting of messages to the ancestors or to great, great, grandchildren yet unborn, and the gloves, a symbolic shedding of skin - layers of witness, translucent and stained - my offering.
It helps, every now again, to do a bit of stocktaking - reassess the journey, clearout the storage. A recent visit 'home' to the States, where I was born and raised, kick-started a new spate of this activity. A lot of work got shredded beyond any possible link to its perpetrator. Some 'surprises' have been lovingly rewrapped, and, for the future benefit of humankind, or my funeral pyre (or both!) put back into storage. Others, hovering in purgatory still required another go at resolution, absolution, or just more dialogue. Amongst a stock of things, squirreled away, were a collection of aluminium foil trays, used for many years to mix paint, and hundreds of vinyl gloves, worn to protect my hands - not from the staining of paint, but to avoid the solvents and detergents that would have been required to clean them after.
I had retained these things because there was something intriguing about them: as objects accidentally transformed through association with the process of painting, and, because they clearly bore witness to - recorded - a history of my activity, that in many ways, the 'finished?' paintings obscured. Consequently, I thought, that one day, they might become the building blocks, the links, to something else. So, taking them out of their boxes, and only partially dusting some of them off, I set about constructing the two main pieces presented here.
Originally, I intended to cover an entire wall with trays in a graded spectrum - starting with red or yellow on the left and finishing with green or yellow on the right. As I laid out the trays on the floor in colour groupings, to assess what I had to work with, two things became apparent. Firstly, that I didn't have enough trays to cover the entire wall with the density I was hoping for. Secondly, there wasn't enough parity of colours to enable the kind of progression I had envisaged. Though I did eventually concede to the production of a very small number of new plates, I did not want to distort my resources and their 'witness' by doing so - or altering existing plates by painting them further. The plates, as they massed on the floor, took on a kind of amoeba like structure that I tried to 'pin' to the wall, and the rest developed intuitively.
The 'platform' resolved itself more quickly, which surprised me. Its resolution is, to some degree, due to it being more sparingly covered - allowing for more integration or engagement with its surface and structure. However, I had less of a plan for it than I had for the wall piece, which, conversely, unfolded very slowly ,and at times, painfully, over quite a few weeks.
The platform is a kind of mobile stage, a processional vehicle, built for another project. Rolled out on several other occasions, to make various presentations, it was intended to be steered into different spaces, settings, environments - a stage within a stage, a play within a play. In this case I wanted the trays to act as cladding, perhaps a posting of messages to the ancestors or to great, great, grandchildren yet unborn, and the gloves, a symbolic shedding of skin - layers of witness, translucent and stained - my offering.