The challenge of following my “Rules”…

My creative brain is not naturally an ordered one as i have said before,  so I have found following the ground rules that I set out in my previous Blog post, pretty difficult to stick to.

The outcome of my “Norfolk pole” collection was a sense of freedom and readiness to go forward with my work, I felt I had “found” my handwriting and I wanted to get on and use this creative system to move the project forward.

However, I found implementing these rules was not as easy as I first anticipated.  Working with other people’s images was going to be harder than I thought and this was the challenge thrown up by of the “China pole” collection.  Perhaps there was a degree of naivety in thinking that I could simply follow these rules and achieve an equal sense of ownership over someone else’s images.  “China poles” starting point, was a series of photographs of Inner Mongolian Telephone Poles, taken by my great friend and fellow artist Rhiannon Flynn. The photographs were beautiful, but the challenge was that they were not mine, and they oozed Rhiannon’s creative flair, it was her eye that chose the view, the angle and the composition.

This lack of ownership over the images was to change my approach to the collection. I had to put back on the “hat” of being a commissioned artist. I had to find a way to interpret Rhiannon’s images and use my new found “handwriting” to create a personal response that would allowed me to work into these captivating pictures.

The “rules” I had lain out at the start of the project THEN came to play their part. By using modern and older technologies I started distorting Rhiannon’s pictures. Zooming in and out on the photocopier with reckless abandon, creating collages from gut instinct, playing with the advanced “cut and paste” of Photoshop, and trusting my eye to create an abstraction of the photographs that made the outcomes in some way my own.

I have attached some of Rhiannon’s photos and an exampe my raw collages to give you a sense of progression.