Friday, April 29, 2011

Collage with book covers/sleeves



































From top:
A Brush with a Charming Stranger

and

Maribel's Dirty Tricks


Developing 2D works - intersecting lanscapes and scenes















Wolves/Suburbs

A mother and her pups torn against a sprawling, dusty suburbia. The blueish mountains in both images could be the same, as if the family of wolves could be skulking around the very edges of the brown roofed and blue pooled houses. I recently acquired another huge stack of old National Geographics, collectively dating from as far back as 1960. Both of these images were found in different editions and I joined together on this new plane. They seem to encroach on each other. I like fusing dual images using the assemblage process. The joining of contrasting and/or clashing situations, settings and objects enables a rewriting of the visual stories and contexts from which they derive. In further studio experimentation, these collage bases or dual scenes could provide the visual base for a third drawn layer etc etc

Lost Girls









Lost Girls (Tiger's Eye Sunrise)

Dream study #1 (Elevator)


















This study is the result of a thirst to get back into some proper drawing. Having been working in two-dimensional assemblage (using essentially just found images and a cutting knife) for an extended period, I felt the need to change tools and get back into drawing and mark making processes. This small scale study is based on a dream about Staircases and Elevators. As not to resemble a naff Escher homage (don't even dig his stuff anyway), I decided to use the Elevator motif. The plait like border kind of appropriates the prettiness of old novel dust sleeves or the covers of fairytale stories, fables and the like. It is just a study and could be realised in a fresher and less wonky way with different materials/tools definitely. But the restrictive style is intended to leave a greater portion of detail and visual information to the imagination. Especially given that the dream itself was a bit frantic and wacky, I would want only the artwork's title to modestly elude to the derivative context of the Elevator image.

Objects/items re-found - photograph of my Grandma Gwen














Gwen's name and image pops up often in my work and studio practice. Before she married my Gramps and assumed the last name 'Bartram', her maiden name was 'Fox'. The literal, animal representation of this title is a recurring feature in many of my drawings and two-dimensional based works and stands as a kind of familial metaphor. This photograph was probably taken in the late 1940s, whilst Gwen and Ron still lived in Yorkshire (they later emigrated by boat to Brisbane). A couple of years ago I had photocopied and enlarged a number of old family photographs for a uni based assignment, I rediscovered this one hiding in the book shelf.

'Tis a lovely shot