Restpoint
My answer to James Bridgman's latest photograph in our Inflection project
In his last photograph for Inflection, James (Creative Explorer) challenged me with yet another complex, richly layered image.
It caught me at a very experimental time in my artmaking life, in that I have spent much of the past seven months away from straightforward representation and exploring the potential of materials.
This time again, I felt I had to get close to the detail of the image, and was immediately grabbed by some of the vivid colours, as well as the presence of fixed, stable points in the midst of a highly dynamic landscape.
The picture made me think of everything and everyone that moves around some of the static objects of an urban landscape, not just in terms of space, but also over time. I was interested in this idea of something remaining the same in the midst of chaos and change. A fixed point, a place to hang on to, to get back to when everything else moves. A rest point.
There is a bench in James's photograph (barely perceptible in a later version), and that became the ‘fixed element’ in my response. I decided to create a linocut plate of it, so that I could reuse the motif in a number of different ways through printing, combined with layered washes of watercolour to evoke those vivid hues reflected on windows and pavement.
Experimentation with materials took me on a number of tangents, including printing multiple benches into piles and waves, saturating the paper with colours, and making extensive use of masking tape. I've kept some of those outputs to show alongside this final work when we exhibit the whole project (and cut up or discarded a lot of stuff, too).
In the end, there were two more successful works for me to choose from as a response. The one I didn't pick is more layered, quite saturated and chaotic. It perhaps conveys better that sense of an ever-moving world around the lone anchor of the bench.
But it is this one, a little calmer and trying a little less hard, that I'd like James to respond to:
i love this piece, and nice to move away from the chaos of my last image (was my state of mind at the time) hoping to get some peace (!) into my response...