Around the world

House, Sketchbook Project, 2012

This is the cover and a page from my work ‘House‘ which arrived this week at the Brooklyn Art Library to join work by other artists, writers, designers and makers from around the world, including someone called Charlotte Turnbull. In the end, the model that I made last year was not only, not painted or to scale, but also had very little physical resemblance to the final work. It began the same though with a scaled drawing of an unconnected wire that was in our flat when we first moved in, ending in my bedroom pictured above. The wallpaper is the first ‘not real’ thing and based on an artwork made from a clothes hook called ‘Splat‘ that I exhibited at CGP last summer. Laer this year, as part of the sketchbook project’s 14 city worldwide tour, it will be stopping in London, at which point I could get on a bus, walk into the Art House Co-op, line up and get out my own book and look at drawings of my flat and the ‘non real’ things, and if this was a Michel Gondry film I think we all know what would happen next.

Today, during a lengthy lunchbreak I saw the Hockney show at the Royal Academy, and I would highly recommend it. It is a scrum so be prepared for that, and there were far too many people who felt that the best place to stop and stare was in the middle of the doorway, but to be fair most of the works are neck-achingly, insanely large. In the last room, they hung a painting that in order to see it you had to leave the show and look back through the exit door. This could be ego but there was something really exciting for me about how relentless he seems to be about looking and recording every single thing that he sees over and over again and that enthusiasm was quite spectacular.