Drawing Project 2014...installation Piece...

I've become more and more interested in installation pieces and decided to include a piece for my major project continuing on from the book of drawings around town.
This piece is all about the environment around us and brings that environment and elements of it into the exhibition space. I wanted to take the original drawing back to its basic elements. Straight lines, no detail and very minimal as opposed to the actual scene I was recording which was very busy and complicated. I didn't want the work to be obvious when viewed and I want the piece to raise questions of what it actually is and what it means but, once realised, to then raise questions of whats happening around us through over development and the fact that we build on every available piece of land.

I like the idea of looking through a window onto both the present and the past.

The use of a lamp in the piece makes it quite hard to photograph and it really needs to be seen in the space.

 'Destruction, Renewal.'  
Corrugated Plastic, wood, acetate, technical pen, nails, cement, light bulb and cable.  100cm x 90cm.  March 2014. 

    Detail of 'Destruction, Renewal'.

                            Detail of 'Destruction, Renewal'. 

Drawing...Journey...Sculpture...

                                                                                                 Untitled, 

                                                     Bottle, rope, wood slats, nails, candle,   33cm x 22cm

On each journey little trophies keep presenting themselves to me. Some have to be hunted out, others are just there to be seen.  Each has its own history attached. The medicine/alcohol bottle has become a time capsule of dirt, lit by the flickering movement of the burning candle placed behind. The rope, tied in a hangman's knot, is covered in moss and suggests a connection between the bottle and death. 

Drawing...Journey...Sculpture...

                                  'Windows 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11',      Metal, cobwebs, dirt.

On my wanders I've found quite a few treasures, (one mans trash and all that) and I wanted to use the little collection of old, metal shapes I found in the barn where I discovered the shower panel. 

The idea was to collect anything metal I stumbled upon and use them in my first attempt at a sculpture. 

Each component was recovered from the old window frames where I found that if I stuck my hand down into the small gap between the brickwork of the outside wall and the rotting wooden panels of the interior, I would sometimes be lucky and pull out a hidden trophy. 

Each space was inhabited by gangs of spiders and smothered in cobwebs and years of dust, and was not that far from one of those jungle challenges on the celebrity? show. 

I wanted to keep the rust, dirt and cobwebs as they give an authenticity to the piece and a feeling of the history and life that has become attached over the years.

I put the pieces together in the order that I found them so it really built itself. 

Sitting on their own in the gaps between the windows the pieces are nothing, but built together they become alive and gain a certain physicality and completeness. 

Print...Experiments...

My print works have been mainly produced around dispersion and the idea of 'controlling a process but not an outcome' which has led to some interesting pieces. In these works I've been using materials found and recovered from jobs I'm doing on house renovations and this has lead me in a completely new direction.
I'm now concentrating on the dispersion of electricity and how it affects our whole lives. I'm trying to push the idea of the constant flow of electricity through our dwellings, our possessions and our lives.
I've started to go completely off track as far as producing straightforward prints goes and am working with the idea of using electricity and its components in installation pieces and sculptures, the way it imprints on us and where we live. I'm also looking at schematic electrical drawings and recreating them without the symbols, as maps of the installations.
This first piece is interesting in the way it brings together the waste parts from a domestic re-wire and couples them with a mobile electricity meter which changes colour when too much electricity is being used. With this in mind the piece is controlled externally by the use of power being used by individuals wherever it is positioned and the piece changes its appearance with no warning.

Through the process of taking these dead parts and piecing them together in an art form I'm giving them a new life and a new existence. This idea continues when the piece is plugged in and the lights shine like an electronic heart through a thin skin of wire and cables.