My hole

 Working title - I sort of like the ambiguity and slightly uncomfortable connotations which might lighten from an otherwise rather serious piece... 

I debated quite a lot whether to make this piece - it's very personal. A few months ago, a few events conspired to drive me to breaking point - in rage and frustration, I punched the sloping ceiling of my bedroom above my bed, with the main aim of hurting my fist. Luckily for the ceiling, but perhaps unluckily for me, I caught one of the joists resulting in a define 'win' for the ceiling, and a definite loss for my fist - although it did make for an impressive blood splatter.

I felt that the hole in the ceiling was potent, and I wanted to do something with it, even if it made me very uncomfortable, hell, BECAUSE it made me very uncomfortable. After speaking to a few people I trust, I felt strong enough to tackle it. I am very interested in the shape, especially the 3d shape. I'm also fascinated by the network of cracks. In the end, I settled on 3 different ways to record it:

1. Take a 3d cast of the hole
2. Make a 2d 'drawing' of the hole
3. Make a 3d scan of the hole

I spent a lot of time looking into ways of taking a cast - it's quite challenging because you need something that will stick enough to take a cast upside down, but which won't stick so much that you can't remove it. I experimented with polymer clay, but that was too sticky. I think the answer is alginate, but I haven't got a chance to test that yet (partly summer holidays, partly other projects, partly fear of slopping kilos of gunk-that-sticks-like-crazy-to-fabric above the place I sleep...). I still plan to do this before I fill in the hole. My current plan is to experiment with mixing plaster and wax to such that the plaster is like 'skin' and the wax is like deeper tissue. In this way I'm connecting an emotions/structural wound with a physical wound.

I decided to draw the hole using Inkscape. I found the process a great exercise in what to leave out - so many shapes, but I decided to simplify them. I also found choosing colours very challenging, initially sticking to the 'real' colours but slowly abandoning those for colours that 'worked'. Talking to the "dead critics" as well as my plan to explore 'wound-like' connotations made me think about healing, and I was struck by the idea of turning my single picture into a series which shows the ceiling hole slowly 'healing' up until it's almost gone.

At the same time, I've been exploring ideas for making 3d shapes in plaster to sell, and one idea I've had for a while is to use layers of laser-cut card to build up a 3d shape. This connected with the vector-graphics image above to make me want to explore creating a 3d representation of the healing hole by using layers of laser cut card. So that's what I did!

I am really pleased with it. I think it's probably my favourite thing I've made. Ever. No shit. This is the first 'hole', I'm working on the outlines for the next one in the series where the deepest layers are closing up.

There were a few more things I learnt from this:

• Prototyping is a wonderful thing - I made this piece twice, and the second version was so much better than the first.
• Finish makes a world of difference. For the prototype I hand mixed the colours. For this version I bought tester pots of household paint and lucked out - they came with built in miniature rollers - the finish is so much more professional as a result
• The mesh is a real part of the original hole, but I stylised it and stylised it... It went from being an 'oddity' to being a vital element of the final composition
• Buying a shadowbox frame for a tenner or so made a huge difference - art looks like art when you present it like art
• Thinking carefully about colours and prototyping them really paid off

I really like the aesthetics for this - it feels like my 'true' style - it portrays something visceral, violent, shocking, but presents it in a pared down, clean way

Finished book art of "Wish you were hear" (my piece from the interim show)

When the interim show finished, I was left with a sizeable pile of postcards, which I knew I couldn't just bin! The book art workshop (as part of the low residency) inspired me to try and to make book art out of the cards. Given the number of pieces I was working on, and the need to get to London Victoria for paper, it took a while to get round to this, but with help from Karen D, I finally did it.

The design of this book was really a story of accepting more-and-more curation responsibility.

Originally, my goal was to try to replicate the experience of seeing the postcards at the show. As such I was planning for an unordered collection of all the cards. However, I also wanted to attach the cards to paper to preserve them, and there is no way to do this without having some form of order. Having thought a lot about folds, and the implications for the ordering/grouping of the cards, I decided to go for a simple concertina fold, and to order the cards into a progression of some form. This was my first concession to curation.

I thought a lot about how to group/order the cards. Coming at it with a bit of a Tomgos head, I decided to try to group them by topic e.g. love, sex, politics etc... This worked ok, but in some cases was quite forced, and left some very big categories. Eventually I abandoned this and decided to group them by the 'emotion expressed'. Eventually I transcribed them all into Google Sheets and came up with a workable set of emotional categories, and a logical progression.

I felt strongly that all the cards should be present, despite many of them being offensive and/or inscrutable, but I also worried about these cards being the first or last card shown. Eventually I decided to put the 'problematic' cards onto the back side of the book. This was my second concession to curation (although it was later irrelevant as we'll see).

Folding the paper for the book proved harder than I hoped - my folding was more accurate than I expected, but the sheer length meant that even slight errors in folding led to the book being 'skewy'.

Eventually I had enough pages folded decently for about 70 cards (including some space at the ends for forewords and cock-ups). With an initially heavy-heart, I selected the best 60 cards from the total set of 193. This was my third concession to curation!

I thought the process of curating would be painful, but the extremely limited space made it much easier - I ended up picking the 60 cards I couldn't bear to leave out. The order worked well, and with a bit more 'headspace' I could refine it too to make small statements and meanings.

Overall I think I told a good balanced story with the cards I chose to include. I also made sure to include ALL the cards as a text appendix at the end.

I made a very nice faux embossed cover by cutting the letters out of thin cardboard and gluing the resulting 'stencil' onto the main board, and covering with book binding cloth:

Overall I am very pleased with the book, although it's not quite as flawless as I hoped, it's good for a first attempt, and I think it does justice to the cards. I hope I can find somewhere to exhibit it so people can see it.

'Lost cheese wax' and plaster play

 I suspect that Tathos would read the title of this blog and say "is that when you stick cheese wax up your arse?" so I will keep the title, in his honour, but assure you, dear reader, that it is not... Rather I'm just recording some experiments I did with mixing plaster and wax. In this case, inspired by 'lost wax' mould making, I was experimenting with encasing wax in plaster and then melting out the wax. The aim was to create interesting holes that couldn't be made by directly carving the wax. I think the results would be described by Tomgos as 'interesting' and by Tathos as 'fucking weird'. 

First I made a sort of hard-rock 'mine' with passages and steps:

Working in negative proved to be a bit a of head bender, and then removing the wax was also quite challenging. I tried a warm oven, but couldn't get the wax to melt before I lost my nerve because I thought the damp plaster might explode. I tried a hair dryer... nope. I tried a blow torch - lots of melting but only from the easy-to-reach bits, and the plaster started to go funny. Finally I got frustrated and shoved it in the oven after I had just used it to cook and, not only did the wax finally melt, but the plaster didn't explode. Happy days.

With wax gone, I discovered the main draw-back of the technique - the wax stains the plaster like a champ, giving everything a strange candy hue. I tried carving back to make the details cleaner, and remove some of the staining, but it's still very much a feature.

I like the view through the 'entrance' and the steps beyond, and maybe there could be ways to make the wax stain less (e.g. covering the exposed surfaces with something like PVA of Vaseline). Overall, however, I'd like to make these sort of objects (perhaps to sell, perhaps for fun) but I'll try a very different approach.

Somewhat deterred, but determined to find something useful, I tried a much flatter design with a sort of weird invertebrate model I made: 

Which turned out even weirder, and sort of cool in a way, but probably not very useful for anything. I tried removing the staining with sandpaper, but as you can see, the clear wax seems to soak even deeper and leaves a weird 'wet' mark.

Overall, I think this was fun, and definitely a technique to keep in my 'back pocket', but not useful at this time.