Friday 25 June 2010

TRACE - opening night!

This week has been manic! Trace exhibition and end of year hand ins!
'TRACE' was a success! The curation went really well and the work was great. The private view was a really fun night too. Here are some pics from the opening night, I'll upload some more of the work asap!





Tuesday 15 June 2010

Finding traces, leaving traces

I am involved in an exhibition in Bath this week with four other artists. We have managed to get hold of an empty shop owned by the council. Here's our poster, each is unique, each of us has left our finger print on every one.


TRACE: “An indication of the former, presence or existence of something; a vestige, a barely perceivable indication; a touch.”

"To live is to leave traces." Walter Benjamin

So... I have been scouring/tracing the tiny park next to the shop we are using, collecting scraps/objects/rubbish that people have left behind. (I've been getting alot of funny looks too).
I'm hoping to show the smallest things in a slide projector, I think I might display/classify the rest of the objects too.

Watch this space.

Monday 14 June 2010

A bit of background info...

I have a bit of an obsession with over head projectors. I love them. Big, clunky and outdated but just simple, honest machines. I used to use them as an aid for drawing and painting on a large scale, but now I keep one in the studio as a tool for looking at things. I can switch it on, put something on top and get a kind of instant painting on the wall, an instant 2D translation. Opaque things create a really cool silhouette, but transparent things are even more interesting. When something is magnified and projected, all the little scratches and pieces of dirt are exaggerated and enlarged. With glass objects, those factory marks, letters and numbers on the bottom become really clear, and you can really begin to appreciate the form and the colour.

These objects are second hand, bought in a charity shop. I like that someone has used them before me, because then they have a kind of memory attached.

This is a projection of all the pieces of broken glass and plastic I found on the short walk between home and my studio.