Championing Insignificance

Glorifying Glitch

Walking around Nottingham after a storm I saw debris scattered around in broken and twisted forms that sparked my imagination; What had led to them being here? The wind? The rain? An accident? Or something more sinister? But they were left and ignored, without a voice. I want to do something with these pieces to give them a voice, to allow them to tell their story. But how to go about this?

Collected and laid out in the studio I ponder how to interpret the voice of the insignificant objects. Under close observation the pieces have scratches; wounds of their previous incarnation. But these marks are slight and difficult to see unless properly presented, therefore I have come up with a method of preparing the pieces. If I wash and coat the objects with white paint I remove all distractions such as colour and mass, then I can use black pen to highlight the scratches on the surface. This forms a language upon the surface that details the events in the life of each object.

 

The linescape keeps growing and evolving with the object, handling them creates new marks to draw around and so it is very difficult to know when to stop drawing. The marks are endless but my patience is not, I tend to work on several different pieces and come back to these trace/drawings so I do not lose motivation. They are done when I feel they are right but their story carries on. I find myself pondering black and white; the pen and the page. How clinical and cleansing the lines have become now that I am telling the story of the forgotten object.

The contrast of the mirrored surface works well on this fragment as does dense collections of lines as shown on the bottom image. I am still not sure how to display these pieces, they have become too clinical and decorative for my taste, the excitement for me was in the discovery of the initial object, the thought of 'what could this be'? The white makes the pieces look alien, as though paper has taken a 3D form and therefore maintains this question but the lines have become too binding, limiting what the object could be and how it can be displayed.

 

I have been researching into Callum Innes’ work where he layers on paint and then removes it with thinners this made me wonder, what would happen if I etched away at the marks instead of adding the details on top. I therefore experimented in beeswax & oils to find out what this would look like. The wax seemed the perfect malleable surface to use and worked really well but has taken ages to dry and cannot be framed easily as details in the surface texture would be lost.

I used cheesewire to scrape larger slices off the surface and then blended them back into the paint for different textures.

 

To be continued...