Post by afroken on Dec 9, 2010 16:19:01 GMT -8
It's not often that I stumble on a show by pure chance and am completely blown away. A few months back I visited the Ikon in Birmingham to collect something and went for a little wonder while I waited.
The main exhibition space appeared to be between shows, with screws sticking out of the wall, scraps of wood on the floor and paint splattered dust sheets everywhere. I felt like I had taken a wrong turn.
And then I noticed the obligatory museum staffer sat in the corner watching over everything. Clearly everything wasn't what it seemed.
The first thing I noticed was that the paint splats on the sheets were actually carefully appliqued silk. Then the flood gates of my senses opened, after being there for a good few minutes. The scraps of wood were tropical breeds, the paint splats on those were embedded mother of pearl. The screws in the walls were made of platinum and the screw plugs that supported them were not plastic, but Topaz.
The list goes on. Every aspect of this building site was constructed from precious materials: Ebony, white holly, walnut, birds-eye maple & walnut sapwood veneers, silver, platinum, garnet, cedar of Lebanon wood, smokey quartz, black diamonds, oxidised silver, mother of pearl, white gold, smoky topaz, amber, mahogany, tulipwood, embroidery linen.... and that's just the media used in one piece alone, this one:
Anyhow, her work genuinely blew me away. Here are some photographs (almost pointless in their banality):
And to put it all in some context, an extract from an interview:
In what ways does your work deal with considerations of time?
I use time as a material, again an attempt to make individual pieces hold a duality of meanings. Often a work that looks very careless, as if it hasn’t taken any time to make, like a random mark, ends up being something that takes a long time to produce.
I’m not interested in using time as a way of making work that emphasises endurance, it’s merely a necessary thing to do. I try to counter-pose something that is quick, messy and thoughtless with something that is the opposite. The way I make my work takes time.
Is there a particular work that demonstrates your interest in the relationship between process and materiality?
A lot of the materials I use are very expensive because they are so hard to produce; gold and diamonds require difficult mining processes. Very often there is a process of replacing the throwaway with something that has been carefully sourced; often these work within particular cultural or poetic associations.
As an artist I try to defile those things, to devalue those precious materials because they look like something completely ordinary. I like the idea that meaning is yo-yo- ing back and forth; it’s precious but it doesn’t look it. It is and it isn’t .
The main exhibition space appeared to be between shows, with screws sticking out of the wall, scraps of wood on the floor and paint splattered dust sheets everywhere. I felt like I had taken a wrong turn.
And then I noticed the obligatory museum staffer sat in the corner watching over everything. Clearly everything wasn't what it seemed.
The first thing I noticed was that the paint splats on the sheets were actually carefully appliqued silk. Then the flood gates of my senses opened, after being there for a good few minutes. The scraps of wood were tropical breeds, the paint splats on those were embedded mother of pearl. The screws in the walls were made of platinum and the screw plugs that supported them were not plastic, but Topaz.
The list goes on. Every aspect of this building site was constructed from precious materials: Ebony, white holly, walnut, birds-eye maple & walnut sapwood veneers, silver, platinum, garnet, cedar of Lebanon wood, smokey quartz, black diamonds, oxidised silver, mother of pearl, white gold, smoky topaz, amber, mahogany, tulipwood, embroidery linen.... and that's just the media used in one piece alone, this one:
Anyhow, her work genuinely blew me away. Here are some photographs (almost pointless in their banality):
And to put it all in some context, an extract from an interview:
In what ways does your work deal with considerations of time?
I use time as a material, again an attempt to make individual pieces hold a duality of meanings. Often a work that looks very careless, as if it hasn’t taken any time to make, like a random mark, ends up being something that takes a long time to produce.
I’m not interested in using time as a way of making work that emphasises endurance, it’s merely a necessary thing to do. I try to counter-pose something that is quick, messy and thoughtless with something that is the opposite. The way I make my work takes time.
Is there a particular work that demonstrates your interest in the relationship between process and materiality?
A lot of the materials I use are very expensive because they are so hard to produce; gold and diamonds require difficult mining processes. Very often there is a process of replacing the throwaway with something that has been carefully sourced; often these work within particular cultural or poetic associations.
As an artist I try to defile those things, to devalue those precious materials because they look like something completely ordinary. I like the idea that meaning is yo-yo- ing back and forth; it’s precious but it doesn’t look it. It is and it isn’t .