As a direct response to our current physical lives ‘Under(cover)’ a mail art exhibition, explores how might art practice be reconfigured through physical isolation? How does the home affect, alter, provoke habitual working methodologies? How might re-appropriated materials, tools, media, objects, situations and images expand the scope of former work?
Continuing the theme from my last post and using packaging materials to paint on I was working with the concepts of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ being binary opposites or the antithesis of one another and my enforced inability to transition from one to the other. One synthesis of these binaries is the materiality of the brown packaging paper, the paper was used and able to make the transition which eludes me. The parcel was packaged inside another building then posted, travelling hundreds of miles outside, upon delivery came inside once again to me. This material had completed its journey and the use it was intended for, now to transform into a painting surface for an artist.
The image chosen to was a small stack of books I am currently reading, a Walter Sickert biography, a Saatchi gallery book The Triumph of Painting, the Whitechapel book Painting and a small theory book entitled Theatre and photography. These books were placed on the corner of a bookcase and used as a still life composition. The brown paper was folded horizontally twice to leave a thin middle section reminiscent of a letter box, this was the area in which I used leaving the remainder of the paper bare.
I deliberately applied the paint quickly to avoid being to precious and the result appears loose and not very refined. The next possible step, once dry, which may conclude this work is to re-use the material as packaging paper and post it out.
Michael Palmer 