The Slow Return

Hi again 🙂

Since my mirror project I have been feeling well and truly bitten by the art bug, and still taken by the idea of trying to get through the massive pile of discarded-halfway-through paintings that are cluttering up my studio space.  However, I am a little time-poor, so I decided to start small with an 8 inch square canvas that I’d already attempted to salvage once with an odd looking doodly painting that I just found really ugly. 

I didn’t take any photos of the ‘before’, just started sticking stuff on top.  I found a piece of foam packaging shaped like a donut on the floor in my friend’s workshop, so plonked that in the centre and started adding things over it- baby wipes, tissue, play dough, an experimental crackle paste I made with tile grout powder, acrylic paint and PVA glue, silica gel beads and twist ties.

I bought a job lot of jewellery from Vinted recently that had a really nice pendant with a piece of iridescent shell as a backing.  I tend not to wear much costume jewellery because of an allergy to some metals but I loved the shape of the pendant and thought it might be perfect for using to make impressions in things like clay or play dough.  I took off the ring at the top, filed it down so it was just a circle and used some 2 part silicone mould medium to make a mould.

I feel slightly conflicted about doing that because it will likely only have a limited use, but I’d had the mould medium since I was at uni so I guess it was better to use it than waste it!  I’ll have to see what other things I can use it for and how many different ways I can incorporate that shape.  Anyway, I used a piece of play dough to make an impression and added that to the centre when it had completely dried out.  It did warp slightly but then I don’t really mind that as it’s a bit more in keeping with the organic style I like things to be in!

After I had applied all the textural bits I felt necessary, I gave the whole thing a coat of creamy-beige paint so I could get a feel for how it looked overall.  Before that there were different colours randomly dotted around so it was hard to envisage where to take the piece next as my eye kept being distracted. 

I added a watered down wash of brown to sink into all the recesses of the texture, then went back over the surface with a pale cream, just rubbing it over with my fingertip to contrast with the brown in the lower areas, which helped show up all the details.

I liked just how much all the texture was visible here but felt it made it look a little messy and too busy.

I started adding greens and grey, then just tinkered around with it, blending with all the colours in various different areas, highlighting a few of the raised textures with some gold and playing around with blending the background until I felt it looked right. 

This is what I ended up with:

‘The Slow Return’

I’ve often wanted to explore the relationship between nature and the man-made whilst creating my work. There’s something I find quite visually appealing about the juxtaposition of those two contrasting themes, maybe because they’re so intertwined in daily life in most of the places we go. I also keep returning to the idea that nature is so much more powerful than we are.

We often behave as though humanity and nature are separate entities; building over it, reshaping it, extracting from it and trying to control it, disregarding the damage we cause and forgetting that we are part of it.

With this piece, I wanted to blur the distinction between the organic and the manufactured. The circular and spiral motifs could be interpreted as weathered mechanisms or forgotten remnants of a man-made structure, while the surrounding textures suggest roots, erosion, mineral deposits and growth. As the forms merge together, it becomes difficult to tell where the natural ends and the man-made begins.

As I worked on it, I found myself thinking about the persistence of nature; how it erodes, reshapes and absorbs even the things we think of as permanent.

I want to create art that serves as a reminder that if we continue to see ourselves as separate from nature, it will eventually reclaim what we have built and destroy the systems upon which we depend.  Perhaps our future depends less on trying to control and exploit the natural world and more on learning to protect it and work alongside it, because nature itself will endure, but we may not!