Notes on process

My selection of objects in based on my encounter with them. Duchamp called this encounter ‘ a kind of rendez-vous’, a meeting between the artist and the object. Often there are acausal connecting principles including: personal relevance, symbolic or narrative value. Scale is also significant as they must be small enough to be collected together on a board no bigger than roughly 60x60cm.
A list of found objects that I am drawn to besides driftwood pieces, include:
Bees or insects (dead already!), dummies, ceramic shards, combs, bottles, pots or containers, twisted metal pieces, wool, thread, gloves, dice, dolls, sewing materials including hooks, money, keys, pipes, and small animal figures, to name a few.
Writing is made with bitumen, white ink, graphite, type writer, old dictionaries cut and pasted, and on labels, material or paint.
The overall aesthetic of the combinages refers to original assemblage and collage works by artists involved in international art movements from DaDA, to Surrealism. Using old bleached woods, varnish, worn out and disused objects generally with muted colours, with some bold exceptions, this could be described as ‘interwar’. Although the objects used are raw and unrefined and made through a process where although compositions may look arbitrary, and many textually deal with the notion of chance (l’hazard - like the Surrealist ‘chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine’), there is a process in which I subjectively play with compositions which can take a few days to a few weeks to arrange and re-arrange. I often work on a group simultaneously which has sometimes created a sub-set of pieces (e.g. I went through a phase of wrapping and tying wool and string around them Hesse style!)
As things are combined and a ‘stage’ built, a drama ensues through the interplay of elements and text is added:
• personal narratives emerge (last year these were often about escaping!)
• strategies of arranging the text to be actively read (e.g. top to bottom, round and round, as well as right to left )
• etymological meanings explored through one word or motif,
and the conjunction of all these with various poetic and theoretical frameworks from a range of writers: including Cixous, Irigaray, Paul Valery, Violette Morin, Walter Benjamin, and others.
A word or phrase combined and explored in combination with ‘things’ is a kind of becoming, it is never one thing it is always multiple.