On the wall
When I first moved to my present studio in April 2024, a marked increase in available wall space sparked a new way of working, or at least an easier way of doing something I'd always done.
For many years now, collecting ephemera has been central to my practise. Whether this be in printed form, posters torn from a wall, leaflets thrust into my hand on the street, scribbled fragments whilst waiting for the bus, or digitally in the 1000's of photos I take every year.
It's probably not all surprising for an artist, that I think predominantly on visual terms, and the additional wall space enabled this to become a physical reality, rather than bound up in sketchbooks or in the ether of the cloud.
Most of this collection consists of fragments of texts and artist's manifestos I encountered during my art history studies, India ink motifs drawn from an architectural text book and photographs taken on my Fujifilm Instax camera, digitally enlarged, printed and then hand printed using a paper-lithography technique.
Being able to physically arrange these fragments on the wall enables me to consider the juxtapositions of image to text to motif, whether intentionally placed or accidentally happened upon by moving things around.
As a person that readily makes abstract connections between things, the wall quickly became a kind of thought-map of open ended directions and multiple interlinking paths, tracing these connections as they happened or were reimagined.
Some of these fragments date way back, from images long since forgotten on my phone, to scraps of paper stored in numerous folders on the shelf. With others, the ink is hardly dry and the result of something of a paper-lithography frenzy which often happens in the studio between projects.
The juxtapositions offered on the wall are not just those which exist between the visual and the textual, but also contain the crossing threads of temporality in the differing time periods in which the fragments were gathered. This allows me to draw conclusions on where I've been and where I might head to next.
