Forgotten corners and the unfinished. Layers and textures in wasted spaces.

I’ve been exploring the neighbourhood in more depth with my children, specifically looking for overlooked corners, alleyways and paths that lead nowhere in particular. Through doing this I’ve discovered forgotten, neglected spaces with unfinished activities. There are intriguing layers and layers of clues where humans have been. A mix of man-made and natural materials, tangled and interwoven, abandoned buildings where a business has failed, gaps in fences to overgrown gardens, plastic mesh rolled up and left to disintegrate while dandelions push through concrete and grass that hides sheets of rotting plywood.

In and around my neighbourhood there is evidently a dissonance of community and underground reprobation. The local park is frequently searched by sniffer dogs and there are narrow paths that lead towards hidden spaces where dodgy goings on occur. Either sides of all walkways on the brambled hill are sprinkled with rubbish. There are people around, myself included, who voluntarily litter pick in an attempt to maintain a space that’s safe to roam around and pleasant to be in. Reminders of how the system fails many people in the UK are all around us. How our national government forces local councils to chip away at the resources that should tackle social issues all whilst barely maintaining public spaces. Empty buildings and unused car parks, places that hold so much potential, now stand forbidden for use because of inefficient red tape and doomed to decay.

I love the dichotomy of the orderly man made with the sprawling natural. How winter has stripped the trees and shrubs of their leaves to expose their delicate line structures. There is a corridor made by a chain link fence and a privet hedge, a garden fence that’s a made using disconnected materials, serving the purpose of a barrier without the luxury of aesthetic appeal. The sign has been taken from the old factory shop probably as a memento, leaving behind an X mark of the glue which once held it in place. Redundant signs are reclaimed for graffiti tagging. Plastic pipes are cut to ground level and left to collect rain water.

Applique paper collage

I’m moving the collage theme into applique territory. Something usually done with cloth but I like the brittle quality of paper and how it behaves when stitched. It’s is also more stiff and rigid, making stitching pieces together more quick.

I’ve also attempted to give these abstract images a bit of meaning by naming them. I think it can guide the viewer to look at it beyond random looking shapes.

Some of the paper used came from mucking about with my kids. The quality of mark making is nicely fluid and ad hoc.

Spearhead. Crayon, felt tip, paper, thread and sequin

Mountain and Lake

Ripple

Ripple 2

Collage

I recently started to amass bits of paper based experiments, many of which come from trying to engage my children in arty activities. Rather than store them indefinitely or throw them away I decided to use them as materials for new projects.

Collage is such a quick and gratifying way to create imagery. I think it also helps train your sense of composition for future works.

Here’s a few I’ve been working on :

Collage is probably one of the most playful art forms. It’s also a great way to generate ideas when you’re stuck. I can explore imagery by placing pictures in different contexts and changing their meaning. When there are are set limitations such as colour and found pictures it inevitably results in more creativity.

Using the Subject as the Medium

The film maker Stan Brakhage would stick actual things like leaves and moth wings to the celluloid he worked on. It would give the viewer an unusual experience of looking at the subject very closely as the subject would fill the space it was projected in. Micro/macro come into play here and the film uses is subject as the medium itself. It does not show an imitation of the subject, it augments itself through being projected. There is a tangible quality to the film because it uses authentic materials as opposed to impressions of the materials.

‘For Brakhage, the goal of cinema was the liberation of the eye itself, the creation of an act of seeing, previously unimagined and undefined by conventions of representation, an eye as natural and unprejudiced as that of a cat, a bee or an infant. There were few filmmakers – film director is too limiting a description – who went so far to train audiences to see differently.’

Stan Brakhage Obituary, Ronald Bergman, The Guardian,Saturday 15th March 2003

Brakhage’s approach to making film’s echoed that of Oscar Fischinger. He rarely included a soundtrack, preferring the film to speak for itself.

‘During five decades, Brakhage made nearly 380 films, most of them shot in 8mm or 16mm, and ranging in length from nine seconds to four hours. With a few exceptions, they were made without sound, which he felt might spoil the intensity of the visual experience. He preferred to think of his films as metaphorical, abstract and highly subjective – a kind of poetry written with light.’

Stan Brakhage Obituary, Ronald Bergman

‘To see is to retain – to behold. Elimination of all fear is in sight – which must be aimed for. Once vision may have been given – that which seems inherent in the infant’s eye, an eye which reflects the loss of innocence more eloquently than any other human feature, an eye which soon learns to classify sights, an eye which mirrors the movement of the individual toward death by its increasing inability to see.

But one can never go back, not even in imagination. After the loss of innocence, only the ultimate of knowledge can balance the wobbling pivot. Yet I suggest that there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind and dependant upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word.’

Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1978

Source: http://evergreen.loyola.edu/rjcook/www/uf/pdf/brakhage.pdf