Paean / One day in May / Print Club ed #14 in progress
I wanted to make a piece for the Print Club that would speak about the lockdown, but also of joy, the beauty of nature, and the inspiration that manifests, whilst also continuing with the idea of the moment in time, and the specificity of a place, that I hope has been one of the major threads of the print club project to date.
Looking back over the past fifteen or more years, I’m ever surer that when things seem darker, I tend towards making more joyful work, only making the darker pieces when there is some bandwidth available for them to land. Visiting Giverny a few years ago I was amazed to learn that Monet continued to paint his waterlily series within the sound of the guns. I struggle with the idea of making new work in difficult times, and how to maintain the sense of value that is required to create new work. As the lockdown continues I have become ever more convinced that we do need new work though, and new voices, that art remains relevant, and worth pursuing, if at all possible. The incoming recession will inevitably deeply challenge that possibility of course.
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My studio here looks out onto the garden, a patch of ground maybe 40ft square, that slopes down south / south east, and catches a good deal of sun until about 6pm on a summer evening. I’ve been tending it organically for a decade now, and tend to pack it with colour for the summer, especially growing roses, which bypass the local slug population with ease. So for edition #14 I’ve decided to combine some sense of being locked down here, with the idea of capturing one single fleeting moment in the calendar, albeit a good one, a single spring day. As ever I borrowed my eldest son’s dSLR for the photography, and took about 600 photos in the garden one perfect morning in May.
The rules for the piece would mean that the source material would come solely from these images, from one single day, and that they would be combined within a geometry that interplays the amazing shapes, lines and silhouettes of the plants, within a more formal hexagonal grid, as an adjunct to September’s Hive piece perhaps.
Ultimately the work will be made as a folding ‘mantel piece’, designed to stand on a shelf or fire surround, and in so doing create a more sculptural piece, that can be displayed without recourse to framing. A more immediate format therefore, and one I intend to experiment with further. I like the idea of making a second piece that combines three separate elements, that can interplay with each other by being freely assembled in a stack, with cutouts, and views through.
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If you’d like to receive this edition in the post, it’s priced at $30 PCM, and will be available exclusively from my Experimental Print Club this June
