There are days in the studio when I don’t have anything planned. Maybe I have finished exploring a particular concern, or I am waiting for something to arrive, to dry or I am just fed up with it for the time being. On these sort of days, I tend to have a ‘go to’ practice. It usually involves taking old packaging or an old art piece I want to cover over and working with collage, painting and pattern.
The work is kind of instinctual. I rarely have a rigid plan, other than I often use interior design books to get ideas for different colour combinations. I tend to create some sort of wash background. If it’s a previous art work, I will use bits of that for the background. Then I add the collage pieces. Sometimes I rip up pieces of magazines or old photographs of mine and sometimes the collage pieces are actual cut out shapes (and I think of Matisse’s cut-outs when I do this). Finally I paint within it, using the shapes and the colours to suggest patterns and rhythms. I play with ideas of juxtaposition, connections and interconnections, complexity, absence, repeating motifs and so on. I tend to leave these artworks for a day or 2 and then may return to paint and pattern within it more.
I love making these. Often they are a bit bonkers – a bit like creating the ultimate doodle. It feels appropriate to be using recycled materials, particularly old packaging as in my head I think of systems, globalisation, commercialisation, the banality and excessiveness of mass production. The patterns I make in a sense represent this. But they are far from perfect and I feel there is a preciousness to the errors and inconsistencies. Just as there is a preciousness to those unseen processes, people, relationships and consequences that create the original packaging and their contents.
