It's been awhile...

It's been a long time since my last post.  I hate saying something so cliche as "I've just been really busy!", but it's the truth.  So there you go.  I've been busy.

Sadly, I've been  most busy doing work for the Gallery and not much in my studio.  Last week I decided that needed to change and I dived in head-first into a  "pairings" project I've entered into with my friend and textile artist, Adelaide Shalhope.  We (actually she) stole the idea from Stroud International Textiles in which two artists working in different media pair up to create collaborative pieces of work; according to the the SIT literature, the "collaboration raises questions about ownership, it tests recognised working methods and negotiates how voices resonate and sing together."  So there you go - basically we're singing.  It's an enjoyable - albeit challenging - experience.  

The gallery of pictures above is my first attempt.  She sent me this beautiful fabric.  I'd love to tell you what kind of fabric, but not being a textile artist I have no idea.  The pictures don't really do it justice, but it was this swatch of this sort of sea-coloured ethereal fabric - and I just loved it.  As you know, I've been getting very much into assemblages at the moment and creating a sort of shallow box wasn't much of a consideration but more of an automatic response.  I textured the surface, painted it, and sanded it down to give it a distressed effect.  I then sent it back to Adelaide.  It was difficult for me not to finish it, but that's part of the process.  I rather think that there will be times when one of us will bring our disparate items to a level of completion whilst at other times we might send a pairing back and forth several times for input.  When I last spoke with Adelaide about this particular pairing she said she was looking at it from an architectural aspect.  Which is interesting and exciting, because I had thought of the objects being sandwiched together as you see from the photos.  Again, that's all part of it - opening yourself up to different ideas and letting go of processes you might otherwise cling to.  

The second pairing, above, is an example of me bringing a work pretty much to completion.  And it's a strange feeling for me - I feel a bit selfish for it, but at the same time I was responding instinctually to the objects.  It's hard to see it, but inside the bottle is an object that looks a bit like a cigar.  When I was out walking one day I found the red band lying on the ground.  Reason tells me it was once wrapped around a Cuban cigar.  I sent it to Adelaide, unsure of what she'd come back with; interestingly it came back to me looking something like a cigar, sans the tobacco, open at both ends and with a corkscrew line of graphite.  I immediately thought of Cuba.  Which got me quickly thinking of American paranoia (not surprising considering much of my work revolves around similar themes); coincidentally, the insert from the Saturday paper featured an article about Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest and this pretty much solidified the idea of working with the theme of paranoia, so I used the image of the crop duster from the film and was going to use the silhouette of Cary Grant trying to outrun the chemicals being dropped by the plane, but in the end decided against it.  Instead, I used an illustrated image of the dance steps for the Rhumba symbolizing the fancy footwork involved in highly volatile political matters like the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example.

Above are a few of the items I have yet to work with - these are mostly Adelaide's responses to the objects I've sent her; on the far right is my first attempt at using my transfer printing process on fabric, which was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be.  I can see a lot of new pieces of work coming out of this process!