Core

Consolidation

Bookmaking project college

Some things I did as part of the bookmaking project in college. This is teabags sown together, with the tea taken out and then blended with lascaux transparency medium. Then I screenprinted it onto the teabags. I began unsucessfully on the nice side of the sewn teabags, so then I had to do it on the badly sewn side. I could have sown more teabags but I was too lazy. Plus I always plan to do too much in college. There is still actually a little bit of tea in one of the teabags above, I had to remove it so they were flat for the nylon screen to print on. That was why I made the unsucessful print on the nicely sewn side initially, I believed in my naivety (I'm actually not a very professional printmaker) that I could print on full teabags that weren't very two dimensional. I had it literally rolled up in a shoebox under some roof slates I also had unsuccessfully tried to print on, (always over ambitious), I gave it to my mam cause I didn't really care and she went and framed it. I asked her could I take it out of the frame and put in a neater one. She said don't you dare, it's great, it all reminds me of you, even the crap sewing.


With these I was trying to recreate the look of a derelict Irish house from the 1950's with modern materials, in order to convey a very convoluted concept that made sense at the time. I burnt CD's, used corrugated cardboard, brown paper, paint, layers of dried paint, and various other things including but not limited to the kitchen sink. Not how I pictured it but whatever. I did try.

and flick...

Just a few bits 'n bobs

I love defacing and editing things in the style of artists like the Chapman Brothers and Dieter Roth. Specially like the idea of semi-opaque materials like masking tape, you get a narrative between your mistakes and your corrections but when you work over a surface like I'm doing here the masking tape allows for an intrinsic reaction to the materials involved.

On the second image you can see a ghost of where I began drawing and then changed my mind. This isn't really obvious in real life, it's just the light of the scanner.


This was just an illustration I did playing around, think I'm going to enter it as an application into the Abridged Art and Poetry magazine. This imagery for a poem came into mind whilst doing the picture, the two sort of created each other - perhaps since I used a biro to draw this it was meant to become a poem? I guess I'm just justifying the act of producing an illustration; which even the mention of is all very unseemly in the fine art department of NCAD.