Photo credit: Stuart Marlin
Wall work
Dimensions: H 250mm x 24,760mm
Materials: Paper, soot
Methods: Paper tearing, burning and smoking
Floor sculpture
Dimensions: W 900mm x 1350mm. H 200mm
Materials: Paper, charcoal, pastel, timber
Methods: Paper-mâché, gestural drawing
Artist book
Dimensions: A5
Materials: Paper, soot
Methods: Paper tearing, burning, smoking
Paper Mountains, 2024
Paper Mountains was exhibited at the Creator Incubator in Newcastle/Mulubinba in 2024.
The artwork sits within the framework of an expanded notion of drawing and mark-making. It involves various literal interactions with the picture plane in the forms of tearing, burning (brûlage), smoking (fumage) and paper-mâché.
In the two-dimensional wall work, a delicate ‘drawn’ line is inscribed along the edges of the paper with a candle flame, and tonal aspects of the drawing are created by hovering the flame over the paper. A focus of the work is production through the process of making and experimentation, with the element of chance introduced by the interaction of the paper and a flame, producing a play between control and unpredictability. The installation is accompanied by the recorded sound of tearing paper, which brings the studio activity into the exhibition space (a reference to the artist Robert Morris’s work Box with sound of its own making, from 1961, where a wooden cube emits a recording of the cutting of timber and hammering produced in the course of making the box).
The floor-based artwork is a topographical mountainscape formed from paper-mâché which is the ground for monochrome gestural drawing in charcoal and pastel.
The artist book is a miniature of the wall work in book form.
Having made Paper Mountains, I recollected my experience of journeying between Scotland and England through the Cheviot Hills, a low rise range of mountains and realised these hills which have personal significance for me were the source of the work.