Print..final pieces for assessment...

The Arte' Povera movement concentrated their artworks on materials found or recovered from wherever they could get them. My materials have been accumulated from various jobs I've done on domestic properties in the last few months. Newspapers, materials, paints, woods, metals etc have been collected and stored with the idea of using them in the future to produce pieces.
I've especially used them in my printing work as they lend themselves perfectly to the notion of experimentation.
All of my final assessment pieces have been produced with mostly recovered stuff.


This first piece came from experiments I've been concentrating on in my accumulation and dispersion project. I wanted to make something that expressed an idea but in a non print medium, something with levels and layers of both production and idea.
The idea was to build an image relating to the theme of a set of images found in daily newspapers.
I realised when looking through my pile of accumulated newspapers that we see the same types of stories over and over but with different people filling the images. Same theme, different person. I decided to concentrate on a specific set of stories that seems to be appearing more and more in our news.
I've brought together an accumulation of portraits of people with the same goal in life and created what, as a collective group of people, they were actually intending to create themselves.

The image is called "explosion" and the portraits I used were of 15 wanted terror suspects.

                                      "Explosion", 30 x 40 cm, paper, tape, eraser rubbings. 

One of the headlines accompanying a portrait of one of the suspects read "We must erase these people from our world" and I wanted to use this idea in my work.
The process involved collecting a set of portraits from newspapers and erasing the images with a rubber eraser until the face had disappeared from the page.
The debris from the eraser is collected on clear tape then laid onto a new piece of paper to create a completely new image made up of the collective portraits from the newspapers.
The random dispersion of the debris is completely out of control and relates to previous works of mine where I was looking at controlling a process but not an outcome.
The image is loaded with detail and texture, built from the layer of rubbings attached to the surface of the paper.
Closer inspection reveals a subtle collection of different colours. Blood red, burnt black and green/brown earth colours all relate to the debris left after a real explosion.
The choice to use white background paper was a conscious decision as it reminds me of the smoke and dust seen in images of terror attacks.

                                                detail from "Explosion" 

Each of the 15 different pieces of tape has captured a different portrait and bringing them together creates a simple yet complex print which engages the viewer and points them towards an important social issue of today. 

This next piece was arrived at after a lot of playing with a print idea I'd had relating to the way we are all the same but completely different and as individuals we can easily become lost in the crowd populating the world today.
I wanted to create a print with one face repeated over and over but with different details each time. The features stay the same but the face never looks the same, echoing our own faces.
The dispersion of the paint on the cloth changes with each application. Some are soft edged, almost happy looking, others hard and direct with a sinister glare, but each very individual.

"collective individualism", paint on cloth, 120cm x 75cm

I tried to make the centre face as clear as possible to become a focus point in the print which the eyes can return to after studying the mass of faces staring back at us. 

I don't know if its possible but I'd like to carry on with this idea and somehow make the individual faces move slightly, maybe through a projection, to add a whole new feeling to the piece.

This last piece is something I've experimented with several times throughout the first term as you can see from previous blog pages.

Looking at accumulation and dispersion I started to build a piece that used collected materials along the lines of the depletion of fossil fuels and the dispersion of electricity.

I realised I've been trying too hard with this piece and started over again with the goal of not overcomplicating things but just making a piece of art that I like but still show the idea of the electricity breaking through the wire and dispersing around us or breaking free.

I'm pleased with this finished piece now and the fact that extensive experimenting means its ended up as a sculpture, from a print class, pleases me even more.  

'Untitled', recycled wood, cable, mesh, electrical components.