Peas and Poppies and Progress

Sally has been stitching the Pea Stool. It's nearly there. The thread certainly is describing the form and contour to a greater extent than before. The green pea leaf, a straight satin stitch, obviated the need for a yellow line to delineate the vein. I know this can be seen anywhere on any tablecloth but it's true to say that you only understand the 'why' after the 'do'.

Alongside this work, I've been developing a new plywood box work to be shown at Partners & Spade in New York, with a variant too in the upcoming show at Direktorenhaus in Berlin. An edition, Anomalous Buttons, will appear for Poundshop at the Shoreditch Festival. Just contributed a piece on my collecting ethic for the next It's Nice That publication, out on October 1st. And developing some limited run sticking-packing tape designs with Chandelier Creative, again in NY. Images of each when it seems prudent to do so.

Haus Study

Back in London after a short research trip to Berlin and lovely, cigale-o-sonic holiday through Montpellier. These images form part of a careful documentation of Direktorenhaus and the spaces Elisa Strozyk and I have chosen as exhibition site. Last week I wrote short statement in response to the rooms and as outset to work now underway.

Direktorenhaus’ second floor rooms, under restoration, bear residue of both the 1935 original detailing and a DDR reskinning over time. In mid-peel, the bureaucratic narrative is somewhat exposed, providing both surface and content.







I propose a family of works filleted, braced, stacked and nestled in the architecture. Ghosts.





In-between inhabitants of the stair well, the notice board, the window box, the panelling lip. The vocabulary borne of intentional and accidental patterns throughout.

Primary, expedient materials: false (laminate) and true (solid) wood, rubber, plastic, ceramic, fabric. Cast, cut, printed, stitched.

Palette: a trade paint colour wheel of pink (peeled), mint (murmured), cream (curdled), peach (palled).

Source Frieze

Went specifically to study this today, at the British Museum, in the Mesopotamian rooms (click to have a good look). An altar frieze, from the Eye Temple at Tell Brak (north eastern Syria), dated 3300–3000BC. It's a piece I've returned to many times over the past four years and really has been a perennial reference point, then catalyst for recent work. 

Find it interesting how something can register, firstly without motive or known application. Just because it makes sense intuitively. I wanted to photograph it as carefully as possible, in the circumstance, in order to sort of bank it. Why does it speak? Something about it being a physical image. Something about the innate colour of material. Something about resistance and variance of form making its own drawing.