Wiki tekau, Akomanga tua tahi
Task
Considering the works of Mark Bradford (7) and Haegue Yang (8).
IND: Use the other artist’s method to produce your own work. Document both resulting works and archive into your workbook/blog
7th Artist: Mark Bradford
At the end of the day, I’m an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist’s position. It won’t come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it’s because I choose, as an artist, to do it.
Response
I approached this by looking at how Mark works with multiple layers of paper, incorporating found materials and in some cases recycling his own earlier work. Looking around, I decided to use/reuse the following:
- an unfinished painting of my own that I was never happy with as a base
- a collection of my charcoal/graphite life drawings on newsprint
- an unfinished oil pastel work
- some musical scores, rescued from the kindling bin
- some string
My inspiration was drawn from the life drawings being of the same subject, so potentially something that would make an interesting layer effect having a dance-like feel to them. I wanted to incorporate that, and use the string as Bradford does, to pull/cut through the layers of damp paper revealing underlying layers.
My intention was to place the string along the line of action of the figure, so that the disturbance created by its removal would create a strong feeling of movement in the final piece.
Below shows how I created the layers, with paint/glue between each layer of paper. As I progressed, I became uncomfortable that the string would be tearing through the body of the figure, which felt somehow abusive. However, I started pulling the strong through from the feet, and as it came up through the layers it eventually pulled free of the layers before it cut through the head of the figure. A happy accident, in other words.
8th Artist: Haegue Yang
I felt so exposed to nature and the local cultural and sacred landscapes. Sentimental, melancholic, even romantic feelings overwhelmed me – tough and rough, sometimes dangerous, as well as mystical.
Interview with Haegue Yang, Debika Ray, Crafts Council, December 2020
Response
I reviewed Yangs work at length, and decided that I would use the following pieces as references:
These are part of her “non-foldings” series of works:
http://heikejung.de/Non-Foldings%E2%80%93Geometries.html
After experiments with spraying into punctured tin cans and so on, I ended up using bottle caps and a piece of plastic tube as masks and templates to create this:
These are some of my initial experiments and setups, including a first attempt that’s interesting, but not really what I was looking for.
