Originally the idea came from my sketchbook: a sketch over randomly scraped paint. This is something I do to give my drawings colour and supply myself a ready starting point because sometimes it's easier to draw over something old. The paint then becomes a palimpsest and structural rather than descriptive, leaving me to create spatial relationships with lines.
I really enjoy working like this because the drawing only reveals itself as I make it, so I have little idea, initially, how the final drawing will turn out or even what it is I am going to draw. My process flip-flops between recognising a new possibility of a shape or trying to get to a relatively understandable representation of a thing and attempting a good, balanced, formal composition. Usually, the result treads a line between abstract and representational, and there are always lots of interesting tangents I didn't follow at the earlier stages which later on need to be incorporated into the final piece. A puzzle, or challenge that I really like performing which throws up a new set of revelations that add a layer of interesting awkwardness. While I draw like this my mind wanders and I find I often am able to make pictorial sense of concerns that I otherwise struggle to put into words.
'Observation Station' 2017
I wanted the style of drawing to reflect a diagram of a structure that was doomed to failure so it's a rough drawing. As if it were a struggle to complete or that its demise was inevitable.
I forgot until now that I'd drawn a teapot, so maybe I felt that the builders were always on a tea break and cared little about their job of work.
So I was thinking of two different structures while I was drawing. One was The Clearing, a collaborative artwork by Alex Hartley and Tom James installed at a country house art museum near where I live called Compton Verney.
The second structure I was dwelling on was this: the Stevenson Screen. A sort of secure but highly visible cupboard which protects measuring instruments from the environment being recorded.
According to Wikipedia the Stevenson Screen was designed in 1864 by Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), a Scottish civil engineer who designed many lighthouses, and whose son was the author Robert Louis Stevenson.
Indeed, there is a line of thought linking the Stevenson Screen with lighthouse design. An enduring requirement for protection against the environment entwined with the need to extend perception. To see, or to be seen. To be a single point of information and accessible part of a larger network when required.
Having recently been to visit the incredible collection of Charles Wade at Snowshill Manor, an open Stevenson Screen now brings to mind Wunderkammer. But whereas current scientific objects are labelled, bright, white, clean, made of glass, metal and plastic, rather than dark mahogany, and full of mixed up, unnamed, dislocated curios imprisoned together in dark glass-faced memory-morgues. However, to the uninitiated, they could be equally mysterious.
Normally presented on stilts or hung from a single point so that they are level, Stevenson Screens can also look like this:
I like the visual repetition of deeply shadowed louvre walls. The first one is 3D printed, whereas the one on a stand could be humanised quite easily.
I don't know at this point how this will affect my Observation Station works. So far I've allowed my stands of observation stations to teeter on unfixed legs as if there is no security for them and that may be something that either has to change, or become more clear.
There are some physical similarities to the traditional artistic framing devices of the vitrine and the frame. They share the ability to be read linearly. Perception could be lead via pictorial methods of composition. They encapsulate and have the potential to be a room inside a room, a box to peer into, a means of portraying another person's vision. But they are meant to exist in the wild and will be out of place in a gallery space.
I guess my drawings of Observation Stations are already pretty unsteady, deliberately slapdash, existing within the virtual as a plan of an idea; an impossible depiction - in two-dimensional space lines don't actually have to meet to give an impression of a space that in reality could not exist. Giving my Observation Stations even a simple and teetering apparatus to stand on seems hopelessly optimistic. The depiction, or plan, walking about on half-formed legs like a wobbling infant trying to make its way in the world. Like trying to make a copy of a painting before the original is finished. An impossible task which doomed to failure, but which I rather like as an idea.
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