At Work In The Studio
As always with an exhibition approaching, the studio becomes a busy hive of activity.
Preparing carved whales for ‘Endeavour’.
Whenever I’m working towards an exhibition, my studio space becomes both very busy and very cluttered!
One bad practice I have at this time is having several (up to a dozen!) different pieces of work, at various stages of completion/construction, on the go at the same. There is method in this madness. Many of the processes and methods I use for creating the works are both time consuming, and due to the nature of the materials, painstaking.
A perfect example of this is in the assemblage ‘Endeavour’ (pictured above) where I have created fifteen whales, shaping and carving each one, carefully sanding and finishing each one ready to be painted. They are arranged to look like a string of charms or a necklace, tied to what appears to be the side of a ship. This piece was influenced by a Native American artifact, made of bone and leather, which is part of the collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
Sketchbook notes for ‘Endeavour’
So, on the workbench at the moment are works ranging from the initial building up of surfaces and making objects, such as with the eight boxes for ‘Walking The Coast’, to the final finishing and painting stage, which includes several works influenced by Kenneth White’s ‘Western Gateway’, to a triptych entitled ‘Cille’, based on my exeriences and the history of the Kilninian area of the Isle of Mull.
Over the next two months, the work will all pull together to form the March 2010 exhibition at the Bedales Gallery, in my home county of Hampshire. When it is all hanging in a calm and orderly manner in the gallery, it is often easy to forget all the time consuming and manic working that has gone on in the studio.
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