Job well done

 

I have just updated my AXIS webpage with these new drawings, which I sometimes call prints and other times doodles, as when I begin I don’t have much of a idea of what it will look like. I start by making rubbings of various pieces of paper (and in this case string and one large piece of bubble wrap) and I making rubbings on top of rubbings until an image takes shape in a way that I find interesting, or it gets completely overloaded and it doesn’t work.

This series, because of the central figure and because of a happy accident caused by unknotting a sheet of paper, I called ‘Cyclops’, although I have to admit the imagery benefits less from Homer and more from an early education looking at Marvel comics from the eighties. I am interested in this way of working though, because on one hand it’s very open ended, and you’re liable to find a hand as easily as a hammer, or a tree as a cardboard box, but on the other, you’re not, because without much effort you will find whatever it is that you are used to finding (in my case crouching figures in hoods) and so to make the image work you have to negotiate between these two points.

On Tuesday, I was looking at one of Raphael Hefti’s photograms with a group of primary school children as part of ‘Ideas for Experiments’ at the Camden Arts Centre. We were making up what we thought the artist said when he finally saw the image that he had created in the dark. Along with suggestions of ‘wow’, ‘excellent’ and ‘a triumph’, one suggested ‘job well done,’ which, as a description of the feeling when you do something and it works, sums it up perfectly.

Cyclops