Incorporating some earlier experiments into printmaking, these composite photos quickly gave me some ideas about the relationship between the different elements. The ground of the lino, marked by effort recedes while plastic components and the painted relief element of lino seem to float on the surface together. Peachy/cosmetic colour irritates me when overused (a lot of Karla Black-esque work around) but felt right in this context.
These sketchbook drawings referring to the rather crude and random layout of google imagery show corporate display structures mixed with low end promotional products. Objects predominantly used in marketing and communication programs, trade shows and conferences. They provide mostly either flat vertical surfaces, or wearable surfaces (not too far from eye height) for easy readability and clear projection of logos.
I’m interested in these aspirational tools as representatives of a particular kind of materiality (…in the case of the corporate display structures mostly clear plastics, aluminium, perspex, silicon/foam ). I’m also interested in how the sterile presence of such objects could be challenged by seeing them as a significant and potentially flexible ground (within a figure/ground relationship consisting of information as figure and structure as ground). An aluminium display board or steel billboard structure are examples of inflexible objects that act as screens for posters or imagery,where as a carved wooden sign-post incorporates both figure and ground: it is both display device and message. Of course the ubiquitous nature of the display structures as represented in the drawings are partly due to the fact that they are multi-purpose and nomadic: While the structure remains constant the message can be changed or altered at the drop of a hat without unnecessary disposal. Somewhere along the lines these thoughts are coming together alongside research into block/relief printing (that aid in the dissemination of information in a different way and lead, through the material effort of carving, to dynamic relationships between figure and ground).
“Every lasting layer of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished….”
This is a title to a 2006 installation by Nairy Baghramian. An apt point from which to start this blog.
Something that has stayed with me from the ILLUMinations exhibition (curated by Bice Curiger) at the 2011 Venice Biennale is Baghramian’s more recent installation. The silicon pieces draped on aluminium table had a sense of being left over from an unknown process. Messy seams and edges. Mistakes. Generosity.
The sense of these pieces of silicon as workable remnants of a process reminded me of some photos I took when I stumbled into a pattern maker’s workshop in the East End.
I have looked at block patterns as a source material for some years now, adopting methods such as drafting, reverse engineering and draping to produce form. Just read this informative article about the evolution of pattern-making: of particular interest to me is the way in which software is developing to allow patterns to be tweaked or adjusted according to a body scan of an individual.
Do I have a sense of nostalgia towards traditional pattern making templates?…As objects that have used repeatedly and revised, dismantled; that have been generated through the tracing of fabric around the body, following its movements?
Having seen the Lygia Pape exhibition at The Serpentine last week I have been looking again at work from her contemporaries Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. Below images from Oiticica’s ‘Bolides’ series. Theatre/prop/puppet show/peep show/mindspace…inviting esoteric pleasure, the model of an immersive environment. This article by Suely Rolik gives a rich context to this work. It reminded me what it means to have been creating radically different possibilities in terms of subjectivity at that time, and the confusing problem of how those new experimental subjectivities became/become subsumed by cultural capital.
Image details from top to bottom:
1: Helio Oiticica, ‘B1 Box Bolide 1 Cartesiano 1963 and B2 Box Bolide 2 Platanico 1963′, photograph by Claudio Oiticica, copyright Projeto Helio Oiticica
2: Helio Oiticica, ‘Bolide 3 Caixa Africana’, 1963
3: Helio Oiticica, ‘Bolide 2′, 1963-1964
