The first ever drawing I ever remember drawing was of me lying down in a cosy front room full of sofas and 70s hi-fi equipment and within that drawing of me drawing on a page I had drawn a smaller version of me drawing in the cosy room full of sofas and hi-fi equipment.
Cut scene and I have grown up a bit. I have grown into the kind of person who wants to be a comic artist. Not because I was particularly good at it but because I loved the way that one drawing could seamlessly bounce to the next and to the next and the next as if they weren’t pinned butterflies but part of a sequence that would just keep going until the sequence ended.
The artificiality of art is what I like.
Sequence jump. I am doing a BA in Bristol where they had these pretty fancy photocopiers. You used to have to buy credit to use the machines but many of the students worked out a hack where you could get unlimited credit. I was one of those students.
For a while I was obsessed by the idea that you could print a scale map of the whole entire world and wrap it around the planet and that shitty facsimile would be us with full sized photocopies of us living out our full sized photocopy lives.
Cut scene and computers are invented. They are silly things and we shall never mention them again.
Except to say. Computers allowed me to communicate with printers in a way that wasn’t available to me when I had all the photocopier credit.
Another seamless jump and I moved country and learnt to screen print. The squeegee is going back and forward and I am thinking ‘This is brilliant. I am like a machine.’ And for a minute there I was as content as a photocopier.
The artificiality of art is what I like but I like it to be obvious. I like to see the pencil lines, the offset registration marks, the machine wearing a ghost costume or the Wizard of Oz’s feet poking out from under the curtain.
By exposing the artifice within itself the mise en abyme (the picture of a picture within a picture) perfectly captures this celebration of artificiality.
In this exhibition I have combined computers, rubbish photocopiers, screen printing and cardboard cutouts to create a series of interactive scenes within scenes that invite the audience to become a part of the art work.
In as janky manner as possible this exhibition explores what Nietzsche never said when he never said ‘Battle not with photocopiers lest you become a photocopier and if you gaze into the mise en abyme, the mise en abyme gazes also into you.’
What’s He Building in There runs from the 27th of May until the 7th of June.
Opening night in Vault Artist Studio, from 6-9 pm on the 27th May.
Live t-shirt screen printing for the first hour.
Everyone welcome! Bring your own t-shirt or garment to get printed!
