New work appears

I sometimes think artists could sound like new-age hippies with the way we sometimes describe how work happens, appears, emerges and is made.

I know I benefit enormously from doing something like rusting pages, and leaving them out in the studio for me to walk by, sometimes noticing them sometimes not.  When I do notice them they often seem to be suggesting what to do with them now. See - only hippies would hear blank pages talking to them right?

But this is kind of how this work came about - it is a coalescing of many things. Like my burnt squares, grids and watch parts, this work came about after thinking about grids again, hanging banners and floaty things.  Somehow, the pages I had assumed would be come a book have become something that hangs.  It's not finished yet, but what follows are some of the working stages.

The back story is that I mis-read the directions for a workshop with Olive Bull a couple of years ago go and cut up so many more pages of paper than were needed it was ridiculous - in the end I think we needed 15 pages and I had cut up 55. So they sat as blank pages in my paper drawer for a  while.  I was doing a big day of rusting - I had plans! and I did all I wanted to do but there was so much solution left, I really wanted to use it, so I rusted pretty much anything in sight - and I remembered these dark grey pages were lurking, so 24 of them got rusted too!  Then they just hung around for a few months, until the weekend, when it suddenly became clear they would make beautiful hangings of some sort.

These are some of the left over pages that I still haven't rusted - so yes, I did cut way too many!

The weekend was really about grids and hanging as I experimented with how you could attach bits of paper to each other without stitching or tying them...here's a random thing I have left hanging on the wall. The bottom right card was also my first play with some lettering, which led to other things.

But from here, I thought about connecting the rusted pages and hanging them somehow. Barry loaned me a mobile so I could see what things hanging looked like. I don't have any early photos of this, just this one with some words, which kind of mucks up the sequence but I'm sure we'll cope.

Are you still with me on my somewhat random journey?

I realised I needed words and knew that the darker pages needed light - so I wrote some words about peace, with the sense that light can appear from dark  (a bit like Emerging from shadow oh so long ago), and then started to do the pencil layouts.

You can see I drew up the scale of the grey paper and tried a few layouts - for non-calligraphers I figure it's interesting to see some of the background work we do when creating a piece. Above, you can see me playing with how to capture the w and the e and the o and the f to fit the style I was playing with (and even the R); and deciding that I would emphasise the words DREAM, PEACE, US in capitals rather than lower case.

So from imaging a bound book, I have ended up with a series of hanging, connected pages.  I have only written four of them; the words for the other three didn't appear, even tho I sat with them and thought about them a lot. So instead, I let that go and will return when the words appear.

I used a white pencil to write the words and introduced a metallic on occasions for emphasis and highlighting.

And then wondered what they looked like stuck on a wall...

And such is the way work evolves in my brain and in my studio. Nothing linear about it at all, nothing that starts with pre-conceptions, nothing that necessarily makes any sense until it is done. And then it feels right.

I remain in awe of the process and so thoroughly love participating in it and observing it!