This series was created for a two person show with painter Natalie Mather. It was created as a kind of imagined collaboration. Imagined, because situations found us living in different cities while producing the work. Before beginning, the two of us talked about points of commonality, medium, the presence of the line and about repetition. To some extent, I found myself collaborating with the past, with works of hers that I knew, rather that these imagined works that were yet to be. There was a solidity there, and a starting point, a set of finely constructed rules that I could work within.
These works, to some extend, also grew out of a previous photographic series. While working on that series, staring at the slithers of test strips pinned up against the wall, one after the other, I began to think about them as lines lifted from these representational images - lines that were repeated across the wall. These new works became about the essence of an image, about how much you could take away and still have that image be about the same thing, and how that is then influenced by repetition. It is about that and the degraded surface, about what you can further lose and strip out of an image through materials, and about what that ultimately creates. Content becoming subordinate to technique.
But on another level, that is a lie, as these works are still essentially photographic, and about representations. They are about style and fashion and the idealised other, about artefacts and icons, about history and the self, and about the repetition and degradation of all these things.
Parallel to this work I'm also exhibiting the first in a new series of appropriations, a copy of Andy Warhol's Skull (1977). The original of which is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York.