Since my last post I have made two pieces of work for two exhibitions. The first piece was developed straight from what I was referring to in my previous post.
Whilst working at Castlefield Gallery, we held a book launch for Text Me Up! by artist and friend of the gallery, Tracey Moberly http://www.beautiful-books.co.uk/119-text-me-up
One of the themes of the work, which I found most interesting, was archiving. Tracey, in a way, had been archiving her text messages for 10 years. Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't archived things usually deemed useful or important? It was this storing and compartmentalising of hugely personal, and to be honest, often mundane, notions that dictated my work.
I had been slowly but surely, over the few months previous (since about December 2010) been printing onto a till roll, with dry transfer lettering, something personal that I had written a year previously at a particularly lonely time.
I had just written on scraps of paper that were to hand at the time, and this is quite often my way, when I feel like I need to scribble something down. I therefore inevitably have a stash of paper scraps covered with all kinds of ramblings, auto-biographical, factual, ideas or silly thoughts. I decided to archive them, as Tracey had done with her texts.
When presenting my first printed till roll (still a work in progress at this point) to a discussion group at Blankspace, I received great feedback on how the roll looked when ‘rolled up’ (how I transported it around in a small plastic bag) as opposed to completely unrolled, which would obviously be a necessity if one were to read the whole thing (unless some kind of two reel system was adopted, which did cross my mind at the time…). It was this idea of concealing something to the point of not being able to grasp the content at all, but yet still holding attention due to intrigue. I came across this theme in the 2nd year of my degree when studying (and then becoming slightly obsessed, still to this day) the paintings of Ed Rusha. I went to see his retrospective at the Hayward when it was on back in 2009, a-maz-ing. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/oct/08/ed-ruscha-hayward-retrospective#/?picture=353990981&index=0
After a while researching, and thinking about different methods of display I ended up showing 12 till rolls on metal shelving along with 4 framed pieces on another shelving unit at Manchester Art Crawl, and the in August of this year, showed the same piece at Office Party exhibition, at Rogue Studios. This is my favourite work that I have made thus far, it took me such a long time to get to that work, but I am glad that I did.
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