By-products

I brought in the tins cans which had been sitting outside my back door weathering for a few weeks. They are variously, but quite slightly, affected by rusting. I had kept stones in them to stop them blowing away. I love stones. I have been bringing them back home for years from various trips, and have many.

I was amazed that the stones, which are as old and as hardy as the hills, had been so affected by the cans and the weathering. They had absorbed the rusting. This, this, I feel, is the point of what I was trying to do, and quite by accident. It may be a small thing, an obvious thing to some, but for me this is enormously significant. All at once the possibilities of affecting change and deliberate modification of ancient materials in shades of subtlety presents itself. It's not just that area of colouration - it's what I can do with it using other media - digital imagery, other processes, to inlay new ideas with the old, and merge them together. Stone and digital video, a frame for photography.

rusty stone

Last MA year as part of my assessment I included a small stone item I had made, of which I have a batch for theViewergallery shop project. They are engraved slates - little stones with markings that could never appear in nature. This idea interests me alot - the paradox and juxtapositions - finding what corresponds in disparate things and creating new relationships between them. It did not make much impact on the assessment, and perhaps they are at present slight, but I think they are a small and perfectly formed idea.

engraved stones. EMF

The other by-product I have come across in this project came from the Making Day.

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/making-day-march-2012.html

Never one to throw the process of ideas away, I picked up the excess surface aluminium leaf with sellotape, and put that on card.

This card is A4 size. It may not look like a great deal or a great revelation as yet, but again, this by-product has triggered something with me - a realm of possibilities which resonate with the areas in which I want to make art - it employs a mixture of material genres, the semi-precious feeling of the aluminium leaf, and the everyday sellotape. I am reminded of studio work I did some years ago in Prague using sellotape and newspaper - just the print that was left behind. There is a filmic possibility about the strip of sellotape which I can develop - filmic in a literal celluloid way. I have been thinking of making a semitransparent work which hangs up, on some sort of plastic with images - an actual film sculpture which you walk along to view. Using leaf and materials in an abstract way, as well as imagery or some sort of narrative, could allow me to create an aspect of my overall continuing obsession - creating solid moving image, or film in sculpture.

17th April 2012