personal work – blog

Commissioned by counterpArt Lytham as part of Lytham Festival 2016.

Created in collaboration with artist and printmaker Jacqui Symons and reflecting their shared interest in entomology and concern regarding the decline in insect species worldwide. The instinct chair celebrates the diverse beauty of these creatures and encourages the viewer to see these ecologically vital creatures in a new way.

By re-imagining insects as a chair the piece explores the structural beauty of the insect form and their unimaginable variety of shapes, inviting the audience to encounter these creatures in a new way.

The piece plays also against instinctual reactions to creepy crawlies (of disgust or unease perhaps mixed with fascination) and touches on the uncanny through use of scale and the re-purposing of the familiar everyday object of a chair in combination with the unfamiliar yet also everyday life-form the insect.

We hope the audience will look closely at the printed fabric, which shows 100 species in detail and perhaps take a seat amongst them.

The chair is being exhibitied at Lytham Heritage Centre until August 14th 2016.

Please note: None of the insects included pose a threat to the viewer and no insects were harmed in the making of this piece.

The artists are currently working on a series of ‘altered chairs’ and pieces can be purchased and commissioned from them.

As yet untitled (Throwing Away Information) is a piece of entropic art which started as a blank MDF board used as a work bench in my studio. (A blank table top state with zero information and unlimited potential?). Through use over a number of years and for various tasks it was rendered useless as a bench top, covered with a build up of marks, stains, scars; the echoes of the work produced. It had been a vital part of the process of creation but had to be renewed.

When removed and stood vertically outside the studio it became apparent that the board had a striking aesthetic and that it’s surface had been transformed to a state of high entropy (if entropy equals information?). It can be read as an abstracted history of the work produced – I can identify pieces of work made on the bench from clues within the strata of marks.

The piece’s aesthetic and visual interest has lead me to keep it and present it as an objet trouve. Not created as a definite piece of art but one that evolved and now exists through the resonances provoked by it’s surface…

The piece is also a new departure in that it works as both a purely aesthetic and as a political artwork.