Friday, 18 March 2011

The Door - proposal for hanging/panel


i have been monitoring this door for a few years now! it is a back door to my local library where various people 'hang out' and sometimes it smells quite savoury or un!!! initially it started with a few words/splodges etc and gradually layers built up and although it looked a bit of a mess i quite liked it .
although it was random the colours worked and you could work out some of the individual layers.
as a conservator i am quite interested in the idea behind 'how things were made', discovering their history and analysing their materials. with graffiti, layers are often built up, painted over/white washed, and painted over again. so the phrase 'you don't know it but its still there' has stuck in my mind. the council's anti graffiti unit has since made a complete hash of the door by trying to remove the graffiti! so it isn't there anymore!
i started working out some of the letter layers on tracing paper with the intention of building something up, taking samples and embedding them in resin (like analysing paint layers). i love the lettering, individual words and shapes so i am not sure how far to adjust them to my own design or whether i can simply 'borrow' them.
i would use a basic range of colours taken from the door as well as retroflective and phosphorescent threads and use a combination of cotton organdie and cellophane for my semi/transparent layers.
as the graffiti is drawn by hand i want to recreate the colours with a mixture of stencils, sandwiched items and hand stitch, working randomly within the desired shapes.


after many thoughts, ideas and designs i have come up with this. the initial piece would be directly in proportion to the original door and at the moment cut up systematically. although i have also thought of just taking a few samples and leaving the original as a hanging and ending up with 2 pieces. the samples would be laid on their sides and stuck into resin so part sticks out. i would then arrange them as a linked hanging. although i haven't totally got rid of the idea of turning it from a hanging to a panel. thought i would get feedback first.

2 comments:

  1. I love your idea of layers and transparency.I did stained glass for a while and one of my tutors, Scott Bryce ,had made a curtain of individual glass pieces "stitched"together ,a bit like your resin pieces.I don't know if it's out there on the 'net.

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  2. That door is a work of art! Like Jenn I like your ideas - especially embedding everything in resin.

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