Painted Verse
Last May I discovered my Mother’s metal stencil set that she once used for signage work in the 60’s.
I was fascinated by these old and redundant sets in two sizes, and wanted to incorporate their use into my painting like Glenn Ligon who pokes paint through stencils with oil sticks. Text has often crept into my work and there seemed a lot of scope here. I dug further and also found a plastic school stencil set. About half an hour later I received a message from a friend:
‘I have an idea which could be a proposal…….I sometimes come up with little poems which plant themselves in my head. They don’t feel right to be performance pieces and I get a little bored with standard read poetry -I was thinking that a really interesting way of releasing them would be joined with art – they are short enough to fit on canvas and I guess are quite invoking of visual response….’
This timely email formed the basis of a collaboration with poet, Sh’maya.
During the process certain challenges presented themselves, such as accidentally dropping the letter ‘S’ between the floorboards.
I discovered that ‘S’ was irretrievable because the floorboards are ‘tongue in groove’ and therefore it was impossible for me to prize them up individually.
I made a surrogate ‘S’ and discovered/decided that ’S' stood for ’sacrifice’.
I also found a hot rod drawing tool which offered an alternative method of working with the text. This was particularly absorbing in its repetitiveness, and enabled other distracting thoughts to be shelved on that particular day.
Last October, Sh’maya came over for a few days and wrote some poetry in my working space as I continued to paint. He was particularly inspired by the old books piled up on the wall and made a list of the titles that grabbed his attention. I tried to memorise the titles and remove the ones I could remember from the pile, whilst listening to something he was creating on his loop station.
We created an installation by categorising the books by title and incorporating them with other objects that seemed resonate with the categories.
The End.
This collaboration is continuing in the context of an Accident and Emergence project:
http://www.pistolsandpollinators.blogspot.com/
www.accidentandemergence.phanfare.com
