31/08/2010

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.






13/08/2010

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).

10/08/2010

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.