Studio Practice Experimentation and Research
My current approach is summed up In ‘DRAWING: Interpretation and Translation,’ curated by Paul Coldwell and Stephen Farthing 2011 ‘Hence for all the theory and acres of contextualisation, Farthing reminds us that, for example Malevich’s iconic Black Square is indeed black, is square and measures 106 cm x 106 cm. Presented with these factual accounts, we are invited to re approach these works of art to discover what indeed they mean for us personally.’ (p.13) I hope that I approach researching the artists, their works and my experiments, with an open mind and suspended judgement. Hopefully, I am able to appraise things independently from my own perspective as both artist and potential viewer. Prof.Oriana Bradley on page 7 ‘For the artist researcher drawing ….is the tool par excellence that allows for both experimentation and accident. From the realisation of ideas through conscious doodling to intricate measurement, drawing can evidence the process of visual research while simultaneously retaining its position as a discipline in its own right. It is culturally specific while conveying meaning across national boundaries; of its time while linking the work of a Leonardo to that of a Picasso, and particular to its function while allowing to shed languages across the science and the arts’. At the end of Unit 1 ‘The Television Drawings’ : I had experimented with the difference in marks between documentary , dancing, murder mystery. So far I have used the medium of pencil. I have not included advertising breaks which would disrupt the continuity of the marks causing confusion in my current experiments. I intend to alter media and include advertising ‘breaks’ in unit 2. Television Drawings : experiments with 0.05 mm pigment liner. A combined experiment of working with a different media flow and drawing ‘Horror’, a subject I normally choose to avoid.
The line has a stronger presence reflecting both the media and subject matter. When pencil drawing ‘Imagine, Strictly, Murder, Model’ in Unit 1 I reflected that my process connected with Claude Heath’s process in looking at the observed object NOT the drawing. My hand captures a trace of the fast paced movements streaming on the TV. Horror drawings subverted this, my inclination not to observe the horror increased my eye contact with the drawing, breaking both my concentration and mark making. The drawings feel compromised, more identifiable as subject and conscious in the selection of line. I felt less meditative but is it the media or my emotional reaction to the subject that influenced the drawing. The duration of the work was also extended to 300 mins over consecutive episodes which could also have had an emotional and disruptive anticipatory effect. Also reading new reference Claude Heath and Lauren Wilson in ‘Drawing Projects: an exploration of the language of drawing’ In 1994 in an essay for ACE, Michael Craig Martin offered a check list of qualities he felt a good drawing should possess : “spontaneity, creative speculation, experimentation, directness, simplicity, abbreviation, expressiveness, immediacy, personal vision, technical diversity, modesty of means, rawness, fragmentation, discontinuity, unfinishedness and open-endedness.” (Farthing:DTPD, p25) [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM3IKOIaah0#t=34[/youtube] When I attended the ‘Draw to Perform’ Seminar day it led me to consider if Television Drawings could link to performative drawing. I could conduct multiple experiments of several suppositions for this work and explore the performative element by using it as a base for my Peer Group workshop.( See Critical practice section : my peer group workshop) My biggest challenge is trying to photograph the work which leads to some intriguing outcomes. A brain wave of using my iPhone to capture the full extended work as a ‘pano’ shot turned into another avenue of exploration.
Ref DRAWING NOW Eight Propositions Toba Khedoori’ b. 1964 Biography Toba Khedoori’s works depict objects and everyday environments divorced from any background. Whether drawing and painting onto thin sheets of paper and stapling these directly onto the wall, or using canvas as physical support, her delicately shaded, often large-scale compositions are poised between ephemerality and monumentality. Doors and windows, chairs and stairs, fences and bricks, train compartments and fireplaces appear at once familiar and unrecognisable, and their “neither-here-nor-there” presence seems to become a space for meditation.
Evocative Objects Things We Think With Ed: Sherry Turkle 2007 MIT Press
‘The End of the Line. Attitudes in drawing’. Brian Dillon 2009 Hayward publishing This book caught my eye in the library as in Unit 1, I was investigating primarily using line! Foreword ref drawing ‘It is the most democratically available and economical form of image making, uniquely capable spontaneous self-revelation and personal inflection.’ for this exhibition ‘ We sought intensity and at passionate engagement with lived experience, steering away from light-hearted whimsicality on the one hand and formal abstract shown or mute ‘mark making’ on the other. Roger Malbert ,Gavin Delahunty, Bryan Biggs Contains an essay: On the elements of drawing by Brian Dillon (page 8) ‘the art of drawing …. is a matter of acquiring the correct attitude: which is to say, in fact an absence of attitude-cultivated innocence, a tireless indolence, and openness to discovery.( Draw what you see, the student is told, and not what you know.)’ Drawing, then, is a ghostly medium. It always maintains some relation with the provisional and unfinished: it may not look or function like a model or essay for a more achieved image, but it bears the physical traces of its passage into being, which seems to ours always incomplete. This includes a discussion relating to drawing no longer being ‘taught’ as a formal part of artists education… Drawing lives on in the era of installation, conceptual and video art-or, more pressingly, that contemporary artists still draw in the knowledge that they risk becoming ghosts. At the same time as perusing this book I was Looking on the Ashmolean Museum website and reading about Ruskin
John Ruskin’s Drawing cabinet There was an article by Stephen Farthing ‘Dot turns into a line….’ ‘Erasure as corrector’ ‘Trace as educator’ To erase – takes you back to where you were before! Tania Kovats ‘Library of Mountain Beauty’ ‘There is a small sketch in Chapter X11, Volume IV of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters – Of Mountain Beauty – showing a drawing of several books that have been lined up and allowed to slump over. This was what Ruskin used to help visualise his explanation of how the lateral ranges of mountains are formed. Ruskin’s drawings of mountains and rocks are informed by many years of pacing the Alps. The drawings reveal his understanding of landscape – the landscapes that are present and those that are already absent, where geological forces have crushed out what was there. His fundamental insight was that these landmasses were not fixed, but that they were in a state of flux, cast up by colossal forces and still in motion. Drawing then became the perfectly fluid form that could describe and encapsulate this slow movement. The row of books at the end of my desk is a landscape, a terrain with an unmappable depth. At anytime you could fall into the crevasses between the covers and leave this world for another. The landscapes will change each time you find and open another book, the way you might change a picture to alter your view. At this moment, the book is changing status, moving away from a tactile experience in the hand to something that appears to glow on a screen, without smell or dust or topography. Here is a library of mountain beauty’
Ephemerality and monumentality, this sums up the task I have set myself for the summer. I have a row of twenty ‘heavy’ in both senses of the word books sitting in a row, to read, absorb and reflect on for my MA over the summer. Will everything I read be retained or be a fragile fog of half remembered facts, quotes and images. These diverse thought processes led to my intention to test drawings, on the fragility of delicate papers in a three dimensional presentation/ installation. I started with a playful, whimsical approach to the MA research books. In his 1960 essay, Berger describes the kind of weightlessness that attends the act of drawing. The surface of the page becomes instead of volume, a liquid or gaseous medium:’ from being a clean flat surface it became an empty space. It’s whiteness became an area of limitless, opaque light, possible to move through but not to see through. I knew that when I drew a line on it-or through it-I should have to control the line, not like the driver of a car, on one plane, but like a pilot in the air, movement in all three dimensions being possible’ John Berger ‘Berger on the Drawing’ p6 In the The Avoided Object (Page 67 ) Cornelia Parker talks about the relation between text and object in her work ‘I’m very interested in language and literature. I enjoy the use of words…….. The English language is so rich that one word can mean all kinds of things. I like the play on words. I like the duplicity and the multiplicity of meanings of particular words which depend upon context’ My first drawing (work in progress) explores the cover of the latest book focusing on her practice .
By drawing selected book covers I question if whole words should be included or odd letters which suggest but do not confirm the titles and authors. Writing is formatted, crisp black on pure white.
It is proving difficult to photograph the minimal marks on the tissue, the bullet holes are reading as body orifices and remind me of Georgia O’Keefe. Photography experimentation has resulted in the best results being obtained by photographing with the drawings attached to a window (See ‘Justice’ Drawings) but it is now October and the light levels are appalling.
While the just published Cornelia Parker book has a smooth cover, the bulk of the books are older, some cloth bound and textured. I decided to experiment with rubbing the covers and spines. I tried out F-8B pencils, wax crayons, graphite powder on supports of tissue, tracing, brown, water-colour papers. Finally using my finger to raise a 19th century Encyclopaedia in tin foil.
Tissue paper proved a challenge, the delicate paper was easily marked with unintended scratching, smudging and staining via the difficulties encountered in my selected methodology: rubbing cloth bound covers and spines.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. — Henry David Thoreau
‘Curiosity’ Sept 2014 Graphite on Tissue paper H75 x W50 cm’s The book entitled curiosity posed the perfect challenge for composition, technique and playful engagement with the viewer. The drawings below were a response to this years Discerning Eye bursary for drawing which had ‘Justice’ as its theme and ‘Temple Church’ as exhibition space. Excerpts from my statement: ‘Creative speculation led me to distort familiar cloth and leather bound aged and new family book titles. Titles reflecting common associations and raw relationships with Justice: ‘A Spot of Bother’’, ‘The Europeans’ etc. Childhood memories of Church brass rubbing were sparked by the images of Temple Church leading to spontaneous selection of drawing technique. This drawing process experiments with the premise of exploration of the use of graphite on tissue paper to transfer the essence of the texture, content, wear and tear of each selected pertinent spinal text. The rawness and force of mark making challenges the resistance and flimsiness of the tissue support. The manipulative fragmentation of weight, transparency and meaning all unbalanced by a fine connecting line invite a fresh review of our experience of ‘Justice’’
‘Bother’ October 2014 Graphite on tissue paper
‘Balance’ Sept 2014 Graphite on Tissue H75 x W50cms The most complex of the drawings I achieved (below), I chose not to submit. By electing to redraw into and define some of the text, I overworked the drawing.
I I question the use of text, its graffiti like quality inevitably predominates the viewers reading as the image becomes secondary, distorting the delicate vagueness. Rubbing the book covers hopefully encourages us to refresh our perceptions of these familiar objects. I found artist Robert Overby (1935-1993) in ‘AfterImage: Drawing Through Process.’ The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles 1999. Ref essay ‘Some kinds of Duration:The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art‘ Pamela M Lee P26 “For to suggest, as Serra does, that drawing “simple is”is to appeal to the condition of its duration and all that implies for the measure of drawing’s pastness and futurity”. The images in the exhibition catalogue were the black and white rubbings of domestic walls with chalk on paper 1972. Approx size 64 x 31 inches. ‘The b&w rubbing series introduce verticality and anthropometiric dimensionality into the otherwise elementary act of making rubbings which record, almost photographically, the terrain of any given architecture‘ p110 Cornelia H Butler
Googling for images showed how the drawings now presented as a commercial investment feel constrained by framing.
‘Around the house‘ his first solo show in 1971 showed a monumental latex casting installed at eye level.
Ina Blom ‘Frieze’ Issue 28, May 1996 ‘So this is what fills the gallery walls from roof to floor: huge latex castings of walls, doors and windows from actual lived-in houses, temporarily transforming the clean room into a dark, decrepit one. For the latex casts show, as though enlarged, every single mark or imperfection, more than you’d ever want to see. A notable (but often overlooked) effect of the casts is the abundance of information they carry – far more concentrated information about a surface than you’d ever get from just looking at the original. It tells stories the way a cadaver on a dissection table does – what used to be ‘just life’ is now ‘information’, as though it had been digitised and the analogous continuum of live effects somehow broken down. There are other terrible transformations as well: the latex represents the walls and fixtures as hopelessly limp – like snakeskin’s quickly shed and left to rot.’ Nouveau Larousse Illustre The Oxfam bookshop is a treasure trove. Asking about old, textured books, I was shown these in the back room. Heavily embossed leather covers, over a 100 years of perusal captured in the apparent wear and tear. They were illustrated encyclopaedias, so Inside tiny etchings of extraordinary people, maps and objects.
It wasn’t until I got home and settled down with one that I realised they were French! A reinforcement of my questioning how much we can ever learn or retain. No matter how much you know there is always more. Inside the encyclopaedias
I decided to replicate all these tiny people. Unknown to me as I can’t decipher the French. Unknown as the passage of time has lessened their importance as National figures, very few would be considered relevant from a 21st Century historical perspective. I experimented with Ink, graphite, line and dot. I decided to work with pigment liners 0.05-0.6 using dots to soften the line and work on fragile tissue paper.
Magnification of the drawing. Consigned to the rubbish heap of history, below :
I then printed my 0.05 dot drawings onto A4 acetate, then radically altered the scale by projecting them over classical porcelain objects from the same era.
Further experiments with shape, I was dissatisfied with the aesthetic of putting the heap in straight lines. Rotations on tracing paper.
While meditatively drawing the heads, I had the idea to make drawings from the book jacket rubbings.
I am interested in reversing or elaborating on a process, so I am now drawing from the frottage marks onto tissue and tracing paper. It is the translucence of the papers that attracts me.
Meanwhile still reading all those books: Since being inspired by Tania’s ‘One Billion Objects in Space'( see visited exhibitions) to create ‘ An Unseen’ I have become obsessed with Graphs. The primacy of drawing histories and theories of practice Deanna Petherbridge Yale University press 2010 Remember this is a fantastic resource for underpinning current ideas to historical works Andre Boetti (1940-94) Investigated grid drawings in 1969 marking a radical change of practice. Started from scratch with a pencil and sheet of square paper, he made a picture that consisted of retracing each square. ‘This experience offered tremendous freedom… All manner of things happened in those squares, I wrote some terrible or beautiful things, secret things which were then filled in because the only rule was to fill-in without any constraints of time or of reason’p172 Researching his grid drawings led me to his ‘Femmina’ series
‘Femmina’ Frottage, pencil on paper. 1973
Anthony Gormley Tintoretto often squared up very rough and provisional charcoal or chalk sketches the transferring directly into paintings,…. Antony Gormley also used an overlaid pencil grid in his drawing ‘Heat’ of 1995 Louisiana hot sauce on paper. Drawing a single standing figure over an initial chance splash, Gormley then squared this image and other drawings of the set with a free hand grid as a signifying element, moving variably in front and behind the figure. This edition evidently served’ to diagramtise’ the drawing as ‘an event-a splash, a moment captured and focused by the frame’ according to Gormley ‘ Page 169
‘Pricking and pouncing (spolvero) in sized copies and techniques of squaring and tracing are very ancient techniques and do not occur only at the end of a process that can even be used as a transfer technique and early sketch stages. A modern abstract drawing Edda Renouf (below) uses Spaolvero as its topic, subject matter and technique’ ‘structure change of lines in size before Chalk-sounds rising one’ (1978) incised lines, Pastoral and graphite on Arches paper with fixative, 533×470 mm. DP p166
Back to the books: David Muller
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/16326558[/vimeo]
Aware that I am moving in to producing ‘serial’ imagery Found Infinite possibilities serial imagery in 20th century drawing in the library.
‘Infinite Possibilities offers new perspectives on the phenomenon of seriality in the medium of drawings and the visual arts. It includes drawings from the 1960s to the present by 29 artists from Japan, South America, the United States, and Europe. Whether looking at serial images in historical, political, mathematical, philosophical, or theoretical perspectives, Infinite Possibilities is a remarkable discourse on a fundamental aspect of contemporary artistic creativity. The artists included range from the emerging to the canonical; among them are Jennifer Bartlett, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Gloria Ortiz-Hernandez, Richard Serra, and Tony Smith’ Monika Grzymala makes drawings in space rather than on paper, she draws three dimensionally .The line she creates connect walls, floors and ceilings, and are often made from materials such as duct tape, masking tape, gauze or broken wood. She tests out the limits and possibilities of recognised materials, her work is ephemeral and usually only lasts as long as the exhibition,
‘Transition’ 2006 Black and white masking tape ‘abstract forms of expression and spatial drawing that she describes as ‘a hand lead thought that defines its own space’. ‘One Degree above zero’ 2000 was described as a giant painting. Over 10 days watercolour was painted onto ten layers of ice in a Hamburg ice rink. The public could skate for one evening and then the work was left to melt. Sadly I have been unsuccessful in my search for images of this spatial public drawing over her painting. The tissue paper drawings have led to considerations of permanence and preservation of my own work, or these works of transience.
David Musgrave [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbbYG_zreRw[/youtube] David Musgrave Solo Show at Luhring Augustine New York January 2014 Origami Beetle’ by Shuki Kato When viewing these images, the question of scale erupts. Our reaction will be very different if we are told they are the size of a pin head or an elephant.
Pursuing David Musgrave references followed up Locus Solus ,Site, Identity, technology in Contemporary Art Ed Julian Stallabrass et al Pub: Black Dog 2000 The Relative Scale of Things : Paul St George and Minumental Sculpture by David Musgrave p 30-37 ‘In the perception of relative size the human body enters into the continuum of sizes and establishes itself as a constant on that scale…. The qualities of publicness or privateness are imposed on things.’ Musgrave speaks of how artists use monumental work to engulf the Spectator in a ‘powerful display of accomplishment, remains the generally accepted means of securing a reputation.’ Paul St George has ‘a gently ironic practice‘ He selects 21st-century sculpture that he deems important, he then reproduces these works to fit within a cube 10.5 cm x 10.5 cm x 10.5 cm. The works labelled ‘Minumental’ sculptures in editions of 250.
‘Minumental impossibility’ 1998 ‘The importance of a multiplicity of possible readings and routes through the work is accentuated by the fact that Minumental sculptures exist in large editions. Despite the recent perceived increase in the access ability of modern and contemporary art, the collection of most major works remains the preserve of a tiny, wealthy few’. ‘Oritsunagumono’ by Takayuki Hori
Eight endangered species are represented in the collection, entitled Oritsunagumono 2012 (things folded and connected). Their skeletons are printed onto delicate translucent paper and then folded using Origami techniques to recreate the three dimensional animal. Loving the methodology, concept and presentation of this body of work. It would have been perfect if it had said drawn instead of printed.
A Fruitful Incoherence : Dialogues with artists on Internationalism Gavin Jantes Attracted by essays on Susan Hillier and Marlene Dumas, found a new fascinating artist Chohreh Feyzdjou. An Iranian jewess exiled to France, she elected to cover her entire oeuvre in black pigment and gum. Working with the complex delicacy of white tissue paper, in its propensity to mark and bruise this solution and diametrically opposite way of working held a strong appeal. I included her in my critical practice paper for unit 2. Exhibition Chohreh Feyzdjou ‘Tout art est en exile’ CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux 2007 Série K, 1992 Persian poetry books, pigment, textile. Série M, 1993 rags, pigment, iron wire (objects made in Eindhoven, 1993) This clinical curation of the artists work is atypical of how she intended her work to be viewed. The museum holds her entire oeuvre and contents of her working studio, claimed by the French State after her early death. The work appears clean and sanitised, modified to comply with the ‘white cube’ gallery experience.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97ei-MK_zo[/youtube]
Images of Chohreh’s installations during her life time
Decasia 2002 Film Bill Morrison Fascinating, found through mainstream research but potential to relate to experiments with Television drawings. It resonates with my interest in delicacy, transience and loss.
Composed entirely of decaying, nitrate-based archival footage which seems to melt, burn, drip and deteriorate as we view. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeEzb-0vf7A[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-FJyJjH6IE[/youtube] Decasia is founded on a deep aesthetic appreciation for decay Decasia is that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal… Bill Morrison is not the first artist to take decomposing film stock as his raw material. Decasia is founded on the tension between the hard fact of films stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that which was once photographically represented.. As Decasia continues, the calligraphy of decay grows increasingly hallucinatory and catastrophic. Excerpts from The Art of Destruction – Back to Nature by Jay Hoberman in The Village Voice (March 19-25, 2003)
Tutorial with Tania and she suggested in reference to my book tissue rubbings that I look at the Surrealists use of Frottage.
Max Ernst was responsible for popularising Frottage (French, meaning to rub) The effects were central to Surrealist ideas of chance over riding the conscious mind. He built up complex coloured collages from multiple rubbings. Researching I found a Frottage Exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery 2009 ‘Frottage’ ‘Frottage; who does it anymore? Who really did it ever?’ -Press release The exhibition begins with Ernst and incorporates contemporary usage by artists selecting to engage with imagery produced using this method.
‘The show is organised to function just as frottage itself does, to reveal hidden qualities, narratives, meanings of things we may take for granted, providing us with a framework for renewed appreciation’.
Henri Michaux ‘Untitled’ Graphite on paper circa 1942-4 (above and below ) providing historical foundations. ‘Michaux’s images, revealing human, animal, and ambiguously anthropomorphic forms, convey both a visceral randomness and ethereal quality.There is an apparent effortlessness combined with whimsy as if, through these rubbings, the artist has revealed some kind of strange and charmingly idiosyncratic spirit world.’
John Kelsey Untitled, 2009 Graphite on paper Sheet size: 11 x 8 ½ inches (28 x 21.6 cm) ‘Upon first glance, John Kelsey’s rhythmically simple abstract images may be read purely for their aesthetic and formal strengths. On a closer look, they are in fact rubbings of bubble wrap, a material that consists of practically nothing but air. (…)’ Some interesting installation ides.
I commonly set up ‘rules or systems’ when planning drawings but but there is quite often an unexpected external influence that alters the outcome. You’ll Never Know. Drawing and Random Interference Jeni Walwin and Henry Krokatsis Hayward Gallery touring Looking at ways in which artists set up structures or systems of drawing, Artists of particular interest were Anna Barriball, Tim Knowles and Tania Kovats but I randomly encountered Mona Hatoum with previously unseen drawings. Rubbed impressions of culinary objects on Japanese wax paper ‘ the slippage and uncertainty inherent in indirect methods of mark-making is exploited by Mona Hatoum in her frontages made from the impressions of culinary utensils’ :internet search Untitled (tea strainer) 2005 Japanese wax paper 27 x 38 cm Gallery Max Hetzler
Mona Hatoum – Untitled (Egyptian colander)
Kate Macfarlane in the ‘Liquid line‘ seminar introduced me to the artist Anna Barriball. Anna Barriball One of a series of drawings where a rubber ball covered with graphite is thrown onto paper
‘There is a process of bringing things very close to an almost forensic level of engagement and for me the distance comes when the pieces are exhibited. Objects are stopped in their tracks and given a different consideration in the time and space of the gallery.’ Anna Barriball, in conversation with Tamsin Clark. 2007
‘Bag Drawing’2000 Marker pen on carrier bag.
‘Draw'(fireplace) DVD Video 2005 ‘ANNA BARRIBALL ‘ Catalogue Fruitmarket and MK Gallery Ed Fiona Bradley 2011 ‘windows are opaque, leaden, the paper buckled, made heavy with pencil, scarred by the forms it describes, marked by the time it has taken to describe them. More sculptures than drawings, they take on the form of their subjects while denying the very things that make them what they are. Treated in this way, they are more wall than window, their materiality throwing is back into the room with them, rather than inviting us through.’ ‘Window’ 2002 Pencil on paper. 55.8 x 50.8 cm. ‘Brick wall’2008 Graphite on paper
‘Door’ 2004 Pencil on paper 208.5 x 88 x 6 cm. ‘Untitled’ Ink on paper 2008 Anna Barriball (above) and Michelle Charles (below) are both artists considered in my critical practice paper for Unit 2. Michelle Charles Michelle Charles drawings are described as penetrating the flatness with her touch, they appear to be deceptively simple. ‘Each drawing in her most recent series, for instance, includes a rendered needle that seems to have knitted the drawing itself.’ George Negroponte Bomb Magazine 2004 Knitting Series 2 Oil on paper 2002 39 x 27 inches.
Susan Hefuna I had been researching Susan Hefuna’s body of work relating to drawing and sewing on tracing paper and had included her in my 500 word abstract for my second critical paper. I visited ‘What Remains II’ a Group Exhibition at Rose Issa Projects to view her work. She is currently engaging with glass, see ‘Absence’ below.
White Dream (Series) 2012 Ink on tracing paper
Happenstance led me to notice the work of Alex Chinneck on my walk to Jerwood Space. This work is considered in my critical practice paper for unit 2
Artis sketches of before and after the melt
‘Developed from a series of large-scale outdoor sculptures,Concrete Rug represents a crystallisation of Alex Chinneck’s investigations into concrete and the boundaries of its material capabilities. As with other key works within the artist’s practice, the material is the subject, and Chinneck coaxes quite remarkable things from the overlooked, almost invisible ‘stuff’ of our built environment. Here, the universally ignored council paving slab is imbued with colour, texture and pattern, charm beauty and warmth. Chinneck’s expansive practice continues to blur distinctions between creative genres through collaborations with a number of specialist organisations and individuals’. I continue to use Encyclopaedia Nouveau Larousse Illustre as the focus object to explore a conversation about transience, fragility and loss. I wanted to create a weightless fragile replica of the heavy tome and present it hanging precariously on the wall. I have been conferring with the 3D department about casting the books to create a silicone mould, with the intention of using transparent media to replicate the original.This will involve destruction of the originals in the casting process, so I am trying a different approach. Experiment 1 I used my finger and graphite powder on tracing paper to replicate all the facets of the book. My first attempt at reconstructing it as a 3D object proved technically challenging.
First exhibition opportunity with my new MA Drawing peer group ( See joint peer group experiences). Hanging the book on the wall was dismissed in the curation. Leaving the book on the floor as an isolated object left it vulnerable, it’s translucence rendering it virtually invisible.Sitting it on the object of origin seemed to undermine the book as ‘ghost’ but worked well as a connector for disparate works in the show.
January 2015 Have used my finger as the frottage tool on tracing paper to make the book, I then experimented with tin foil.
In retrospect I thing this idea germinated from the carved halo’s of the saints inThe San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece by Jacopo di Cioni, see The National Gallery Project. The calibre of the tin foil rubbing was a surprise. I then decided to experimentally pour a shallow covering of plaster into it. The white plaster was bland and uninspiring but raising the surface with a graphite stick, created a monolithic grave slab which also curiously acknowledged books.The tooled leather cover and contents now appeared smothered, beneath carved granite. |
