4sight exhibition

Printmaking exhibition 10 - 17 September 2010

22 senior students and lecturers from Dunedin School of Art.

This show was a trial run for graduating students taking part in SITE10

Image shows a reconstructed drain made from recycled newspaper and a framed silkscreen of an urban oasis also on recycled newspaper.

Dappled sunlight was rippling across image accentuating the foliage.

The start of an expanding drainage system that I hope to install in the gallery at the end of year exhibition.

OUSA Art Week

August 2010

An installation in poster boxes (formerly where exam results were posted) in the beautiful old archway building of Otago University.

Just need the broomstick for a game of quidditch!

Works from the 2009 Urban Botanist series and screenprints on handmade recycled newspaper.

Hocken Collections

100 Up - a snapshot of Dunedin life: 1910 & 2010

31 July 2010 – 21 January 2011

I have a new part time position working for Art Crew Ltd. The job involved hanging 112 works (mainly photographs) for the latest Hocken show celebrating 100 years of the Library. The pressure was on, the work intense with lots of variety, but wonderfully satisfying seeing the end result.

Urban Botany Year 4 Semester 1

This 'found' image of Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, seen in the National Geographic has sparked this years project. Palm Jumeirah is a man-made island formed in the shape of a cultural icon, the palm tree. For me, the palm tree symbolises warm, tropical island holidays while also conjuring an image of a fertile oasis, a refuge. Research looks at man's manipulation of the environment and infrastructure dealing with utility services such as water supply, sewerage and wastewater.

This quote from Dorothy Sayers in 'Why Work' , struck a chord.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand.

My interpretation of Sayers' quote echoes the impact of wasteful consumption today. Artificial stimulation could very easily refer to the effects of the superficial, man-made urban metropolis, where population growth and consumption place huge demands on this hedonist oasis.

The urban botanist experiences the city. So how does Palm Jumeirah form an alliance with a local, lived experience here in Dunedin? The association of Palm Jumeirah to the oasis, and reclamation both of the land and in recycling of materials, generate notions of the act of draining in a transforming and transient landscape.

Newspaper is pulped and transformed into handmade paper with fragments of the newspaper visible and partially legible. Also, in recycling newspaper, layers are built up through collage, deleting or exposing bold text in the manner of pasted city posters. The newspaper dries, taking on the form of cylinders or tubes representing drains. Newspaper joiners are made creating a network of interconnecting drains.

Drains imply dirt - waste – abjection. Robert Gober's work, with his use of sinks, urinals and drains is Abject. These mundane objects present us with the banalities of life that according to Gober, flow beneath the everyday.

The relationship between abjection and the botanist is explored in studio practice through an urban inquisition in what is often regarded as repulsive - the socially less presentable function of drainage systems. Drains in the urban landscape are neglected, somewhat obscured vessels of waste facilitating effective disappearance of human presence. The regular, labour intensive process of papermaking in the studio has become a ritualistic undertaking, like daily ablutions of flushing and draining. The handmade paper incorporates shredded newspaper, disintegrated fragments of daily news, a palimpsest, blending into a mid-tone grey colour suggesting an urban, man-made landscape of concrete and asphalt.

Photographs record and document urban drains where weeds persist in waste spaces of the cultivated milieu, fertile urban oases. Manipulated into b/w images for screenprinting on handmade paper, a chiaroscuro effect, integrating a relationship between the creative process of reclaiming newspaper and prosaic imagery celebrates the overlooked.

Samples of photographs using the infra red filter to accentuate the plant life.

Transformed into black and white screen prints using mid tone grey hand made paper.

Size approximately A3

The Urban Botanist

Year 3, semester 2

Final work presented in SITE 09 at the Dunedin School of Art prior to graduation.

To glean is to make effective use of waste or leftovers. We are a society that consumes more resources than the planet can generate. By gleaning waste materials from a disposable consumer culture, the work engages in regeneration of newspapers and found metal objects.

The cultivation of this project explores the process of collage and screenprinting, allowing me to excavate urban detritus and encapsulate an archive of civilisation. Works challenge the notion of value placed on consumer waste.

The urban botanist endeavors to supplant the value and meaning of waste into objects of display. Urban detritus adopts renewable, organic form.

The Urban Botanist - Crooked, 2009

collage & screenprint on newspaper 598 x 420 mm

Newspaper is glued using flour paste like posters pasted around the city. The layers are cut or torn, uncovering text and colour that exists on the page becoming a collapsed collage. Text provides titles for the work while commenting on current topics relating to our consumer society revealing a palimpsest of diverse layers beneath the surface.

Found flat metal discs, the detritus of urbanisation and industrialisation, are used in the screen print process to overlay the surface of the paper, inverting the décollage process to further disrupt original meaning.

The newspaper is dried slowly, creating an abstract, multi layered form under tension, curving and buckling of its own accord. The work regenerates a former existence, appearing as tree bark into a hybrid of urban botany, containing traces of urban identity.

Wunderkammer I, 2009,

mixed media on paper,

In the reclamation of metal objects, the discovery of paint surfaces blistering and peeling like bark from exposure to the elements experiences another transformation in the gleaning process. These paint layers reveal on the underside, colours, patterns and textures, providing a surrealist landscape for décollage of the discarded into objects of art to complement the newspaper work. This work uncovers a connection to the Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity, the sense of wonder exposed from paint layers on discarded metal objects, originating as cabinets, challenging the classification of their worth.

This work exposes the printmaker who allows nature to offer the print. It has the same feeling as in the workshop when you peel the paper off the plate after rolling through the press for the first time, revealing one of those happy accidents.

SITE 09 display - 15 units on a narrow shelf

SITE 09 Wunderkammers

3000 word essay

Year 3, semester 1, essay 3

Contextualising my current art practice - excerpt

My current body of work in printmaking relates to a project involving the apple, the multiple and screenprinting, merging art, life and science. Through exploration and research I am looking at the subject of gleaning. The initial idea has evolved through my interest in self sufficiency. The concern for the depletion of fossil fuels, their impact on the environment through globalisation, food miles and the search for alternative energy has led me to investigate the role of the wilding apple trees. These grow on our roadsides producing apples that generally go to waste. Apples have the potential of becoming an alternative fuel in the form of alcohol, a project that is currently of interest to my partner, through which I am also involved.

With regard to gleaning, a major art historical reference is the painting titled The Gleaners by Jean Francois Millet. This work, depicting women in a field gleaning grain after the harvest, represents peasant life and contemporary social conditions. There is a powerful physical expression and poignancy in this work that signifies his concern for mankind, particularly an empathy with the poor or lower class. The women in Millet's painting are gleaning grain, however, it is the subject of crops not utilised for harvest, food that goes to waste, that is of interest to me.

Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization stated that making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key – and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key who would work?1 In today's capitalist climate, this statement implies the fate of our troubled global economy. Quinn doesn't provide an answer, instead encourages us to become engaged in the world, and change our way of thinking in our working environment.

Jean Francois Millet, The Gleaners

Jelly label

1 Daniel Quinn. Beyond Civilization New York; Three Rivers Press. 1999, p5

Art & Language

Year 3, semester 1, essay 2

Excerpt

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.1

Seeing establishes our place in the world. To communicate what and how we see we need a language. As a child, one way I learned about language was through illustrated picture books that combine alphabet, word and image. As I grew and gained a broader understanding of language through books, the images decreased. As an artist, I feel I am returning to the idea of the illustrated picture book, so that I may communicate my thoughts and ideas. By verbalising the visual, I engage in communication with other human beings, so they may see what I see. Language is the key for our understanding of art. Language also influences our perception of the world. This essay will explore the relationship between art and language to human beings, through perception and semiotics to enable me to contextualise my current art practice in printmaking.

Understanding language is the key to understanding or making sen se of things. The human life world is a world in which human beings are engaged with others. Through language, human beings are engaged in a world of meanings.

This sentence highlights our need to understand written language. By using Webdings, a dingbat font that renders letters as symbols, I imagine this sentence is meaningless to anyone untrained in the interpretation of Webdings.

Understanding language is the key to understanding or making sense of things. The human life world is a world in which human beings are engaged with others. Through language, human beings are engaged in a world of meanings.2

For me, art is a visual language. Conceptual art has opened the door to artistic freedom, engaging with others in the human life world. Artists can, through intersubjectivity in a shared world, express concerns that affect their social environment. The search for a better way of life is expressed in my work, through concerns for the care and protection of my children. I consider social issues, ranging from human impact in the global and local environment, to issues regarding consumption and sustainability. Works I reference, will be analysed in a social context as this has a bearing on my work, to allow you to see what I see.

1 John Berger. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972 p7

2 This sentence is the translation of the Webdings version