Wednesday 24 August 2011

Collecting marks





I have been on a bit of a sabbatical from all work recently as I have needed to clear my head but I have been thinking about the relationship of the literary connections to the landscapes i.e. Conrad to Essex and Dickens to Kent.
With this in mind I have been working on some ideas of gathering marks made by previous owners and any unique hidden identities in paperback versions of the stories of Great Expectations (Dickens) and Heart of Darkness (Conrad). I bought some carbon powder to dust onto the pages and then try to pick up the dust and any marks with scotchtape. So far what I had wanted to achieve has not worked as I thought it would but then as with all things, there have been unexpected discoveries. They are only small things but nonetheless exciting (to me). I was using the tape to apply to the dust and pages and when I peeled it off, it took some of the text with it. Continued application of this process on the same area meant that the text became more worn away and degraded which left its own mark on the book.
One of the other interesting results was observing the words which were worn away and isolating those words from the bulk of the text. So I took the sequence of words which had been affected by the tape and then wrote them out.
Here is one selection of words;

limits to the
must take care
long reaches that
that were exactly
of secular trees
of another world
of massacres of
shutter" said Kurtz
I did so. There was
he cried at the
invis_
- as I had exp_
an island. Th_


Saturday 13 August 2011

Review of the exhibition Atsuko Tanaka; The Art of Connecting

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/preview/1450615

Please follow the link to see the review that I wrote for Interface, Artists Newsletter on the exhibition at the Ikon in Birmingham of Atsuko Tanaka; the Art of Connecting.