with Chrissie

Before IYC, Chrissie and I had worked on a couple of things before. This was for an exhibition with Peepshow quite a while ago now. One part of my work was displaying some of my collected ephemera. Chrissie created large scale versions.


Another - Hallowe'en fashion story in Complex magazine.




Photography John Short

new friends

Our final line up.



The way I approached it was not to have an idea of a 'body' but more about making nice combinations of the materials we found. Some were simple, some more complex. Floating shapes within the entire composition and areas of detail.

I was really interested in walking the line between figuration and abstraction - to keep things semi-recognisable while not giving in to the point when it 'becomes' something else.
We had an idea that they would be viewed from all sides, so when construction started, it was interesting to work on one area, and then walk around it to see what happened with the decisions you just made on the other side. I don't think my set are particularly 3dimensional in this respect - they are all quite flat on all sides.

Although i wanted to refrain from anything too figurative, i couldn't resist with this one.
Again, the placement of features/bodily bits move around so that there is never one definitive reading. If the triangle is a hat, then the circles are eyes, but it the triangle is a head then the circles are breasts etc.

A snippet of our catalogue contribution featured on It's Nice That.

IYC WIP

Chrissie and I both wanted to develop our already tried and tested ways of working. Our practice does overlap here and there and we both find that there is a common interest in creating objects but also the need to photograph them, and thinking in turn about what the actual outcome is - the thing or the image?
To move things on we spent some time gathering as much scrap material as possible from friend's workshop bins. The idea was to work in a similar way to our smaller kit of parts, but this time play on a bigger scale.

The nicest thing was to come to these pieces as an outsider given they already had a bit of a history - a joint that had gone wrong, an offcut from a more important shape. A bit like a puzzle to be made sense of in material terms alone.

Although we decided we wanted to create structures/figures, I instinctively wanted to arrange the pieces according to material, colour, shape etc. It would become something else to have gone down that route in this context, but something to explore another time.