My latest experimentation with
ways to “recycle” prints that I am not satisfied with is to juggle lots of
little squares of paper about. It started with a collage of irregularly shaped
pieces of print that I put together in my visual diary. Then I tried the idea
at a larger scale, as a piece of art, but wasn’t really happy with the result.
I’ve always been attracted
to the concept of patchworks, fragments of lives and histories joined together
in a regular pattern. I’m also drawn by the idea of pixels, each square with
its own particular information. So, I decided to combine the two thoughts,
though with real pieces of my art history forming the “pixels” of my patchwork,
rather than digital information.
As a result I have been
playing around with many small pieces of paper. Cutting the squares is slow and
tedious (guillotine strips, then place a few one on top of the other to cut
small). I have done both 2cm squares and 1cm squares, which makes for a lot of
squares. The 1 cm squares were particularly excruciating, but when I get an
idea it takes me a lot to give up, even when I realise half way through that
what I am doing it is pretty insane. Keeping the squares in order led me to
fill lots of little, labelled zip-lock bags with the different colours and
patterns.
In both cases I have firstly
planned the work in my visual diary then attached the squares with blu-tack and
lastly glued them down when I am satisfied with the composition. While working
on the 1cm squares recently I suddenly looked at my grid of blu-tack blobs and
thought that they looked interesting…… I can feel another “idea” coming on.
