From Home to Studio 2024

From Home to Studio:
Themes: labour, time, fragments, plaster, singular materiality, movement, sculpture, time-based sculpture, language
Solid plaster tube lengths were made by pouring plaster into plastic tubing. The process was trial and error and each length was better than the last. Once the lengths of plaster are made a road sign is painted onto each length. The road signs are indicative of time and space (time taken to make and paint the signs and the journey to and from home to the studio). Each road sign represents the street passed on the journey from home to studio.

The road signs are painted on around the lengths so that each letter that is painted on after the plaster ‘stick’ is turned. The turning causes more breakages in the plaster and also makes the road signs very hard or impossible to read.

The work ends up fragmented and could be seen to be old, as if some found fragments from an old signage system. This sense of these sticks having some sense of purpose in some old system. The process of fragmenting the signs slows down the viewer encounter and allows space for questioning. The fragility of the sticks means that the reading of the works would mean their destruction.

Interest in how the process is visible within the work. How labour is visible within the work. How does the artist make decisions about whether the work is ‘slick’ enough or ‘well-made’ enough?

The work also expresses a time for the artist in which getting to the studio was extremely hard. The signs were from metal sign writing equipment from the artist’s grandfather.
The interest in plaster was an interest in the insides of solid objects being exposed. Language is an ongoing interest for the artist, in particular the attachment of meaning to a sign as arbitrary and the muteness of the individual letters.