An evolving, collaborative and site responsive collage installation exploring ideas of narrative and context/history. Also a small collage exhibited and a workshop run for the festival.
A collage was accepted for the 3rd International Collagistas Festival at the Kelderman en van Noort gallery in Eindhoven. The exhibition involved 42 artists from 18 countries.
I also made the 5th iteration of our large 'travelling' collage installation.
The British Council funded our travel and subsistence and UCA funded printing costs for the large collage.
We also ran a collage workshop as part of a week of events for the festival.
'Travelling Collage Installation' – an evolving, collaborative and site responsive collage installation exploring ideas of narrative and context/history.
The objective is to create an evolving, changing artwork that responds to its location (and previous locations), that is temporary and is never resolved – a work that might last a lifetime. Contained within it, and hidden, is the narrative of its previous history.
Ideas around narrative, 'back story' and incongruity, as well as the elements of chance and serendipity in its construction, are important to the project.
The method thought most appropriate for this was the use of adapted and worked-over digital photographs and drawings which would be digitally printed at enlarged scale printed and collaged on to temporary constructions at a location. These drawn over and manipulated images were often made on mobile phones while travelling from the previous location, where the photographs were taken. This method also lends itself to the collaborative nature of the project (I work with my creative partner Chris Rutter).
The work is portable and capable of being packed into a large suit case.
Questions about how much information is required for a viewer to 'understand' a work and how much is, and should be, open to interpretation and 'projection' are implicit in the work. Ideas about the relationship between author(artist), audience and artwork, investigated by Umberto Ecco and Roland Barthes for example, are relevant here.
The work so far has existed in a hotel room in Zurich (Limmathaus Hotel), a Duchamp Festival in Herne Bay, a decommissioned lightship on the River Medway (LV21), a gallery in Eindhoven (Kelderman en van Noort) and will be travelling to Cyprus in March 2018.
The project has been supported by UCA Research Fund.
link to LV21, Duchamp Fest, Zurich.
