Camberwell College of Art

Showtime today, July 13 2010.

I’ve now finished my final project, TAKE 7, which will be the main piece in the installation of my MA exhibition on 13 July.

There won’t be any pictures of it until the exhibition, because I want you to come to see it.

The project is a conclusion to my last 9 month encounter with screen printing It crystallises the development in my drawing and the new phase or stage of working on narrative drawings, which is an obsession that has been going on as far back as I can remember.

It’s on piece of work mad up of 64 drawings printed only with black ink on white, thick, tile-like card. The 64 tiles fit together edge to edge creating on piece 230 x 170 cm. It’s influenced by German expressionism, film noir, comic books and graphic novels (like Frank Miller) – yet it’s not precisely any of that and doesn’t look like any of that.

It’s a wall based piece, fronted by a table that has 3 of the drawing books on it. Each book has 1100 drawings and I chose them at random form the 8 drawing books I’ve made.

With this project I am trying to “trap” my audience into spending as much time with my work as positionable, like they might stay with a movie. There are 330 pictures in the books and 64 on the wall so that makes 394 pictures to look at. If they spend 2 seconds in front of every picture they will spend 13 minutes about the time of an average short film. Or they leave like they’d leave a film, in the middle. But surely curiosity will make people want to look into the books. It can’t be just in-out, even for those who hate it. It’s a bit like Scheherazade in 1001 Nights, she stayed alive by trapping the guy in some weird narrative that kept going for 1001 nights.

ON the commercial side of things I’ve made 10 similar boxes, each one of them containing the 64 pieces I’m exhibit on the wall/ There wont be any single prints for sale form this set. I am trying to be “faithful” to film as my conceptual method, so if you want to buy you must buy the whole set of 64 the way you’d buy a whole film on DVD, not one shot. And again, you’ll have to spend at least 128 seconds looking at it, that’s if you flip through them one by one.

The prints in the boxes are cut to the edges and can’t be framed (at least not in the conventional sense). And here I’m also being faithful to the project: discouraging any separation of them.

So why didn’t I just instead put my drawing on the timeline and make a film? Why am I making this paper based thing? Well, it’s because of the fact that there’s no linear editing. A timeline imposes a linear principle, makes a sequence. I arranged these 64 pieces on the wall based on a total concern with the mathematical calculation of harmony between the positive and negative spaces present in the black and white, regardless of the meaning or subject matter in the drawing itself.

I know a lot of people will find it strange for me to be talking here about conscious mathematical principles since I’ve already said I’ve made the drawing books in a “shamanistic” state of semi-consciousness. And it’s this kind of mix, between the total madness and total control that Leon Golub found to be the reason behind Goya’s genius. (Robert Hughes Goya, Crazy Like Genius)

Also, by putting the 64 pieces on the wall, I’m breaking both the rules of film and the rules of comics: I’m confronting the audience with a whole to of images at the same time and entice them to edit his or her own version of the story.