These are strange times. The change of routine and having to stay at home can’t help but affect how we work as artists and what we make. For me, the past month has been full of experiments and different ways of working. Thinking about Renee Bevans PUSH/PULL workshop, my process has definitely been focused on PUSH; a push away from my go-to forms such as buttons and switches and towards what I hope will be new and different work.
My current practice involves collecting images within my own everyday life (a convenient source of research during the lockdown!) I’m allowing myself to be quite free and open to what I notice and, at this point, to not worry about having an overly cohesive body of work. I have then been using drawing, collage and maquettes to convert the things I find into quick objects. By ‘quick’ I mean, using materials close to hand (often found or repurposed) and having a limit of 3 hours to make each object. I’m gradually collecting quite a large archive of images, drawings and objects and it is a great way of testing materials, forms and ideas. I imagine I will need to start to PULL back and refine what I am making at some point but, for the time being, this process has been a great way of continuing to make things and takes the pressure off a bit during a time when there are a lot of other things going on in the world.
P.S. It turns out I couldn’t completely stay away from the switches! But I looked at different ways of representing them such as Iris Eichenberg’s suggestion of making things that are just familiar; the hint of a switch.
