Summer Residency

I was the artist in residence at Ken Art Space, in Kennington, London, from July to September 2024

I used this residency as an opportunity to develop my works using found and collected reproductions of historical paintings.

As with the work I make using analogue photography, my Paper Works aim to explore both the material nature and the compositional construction of images.

These works are made using simple, playful strategies of sticking, cutting, re-arranging, folding and weaving the colour plate pages of historical art albums. These publications, dating from the 1960s and ‘70s, aimed to make affordable, larger scale, colour reproductions of celebrated paintings from the canon of western art available to the general public. Albums like these were purchased and collected by my grandmother and flicking through their pages became an important source of knowledge and wonder as I was growing up.

While the quality of the reproduction offers a far-from-faithful representation of the original works, and the selection of artists tends to reflect a formulaic celebration of the western canon, these images nonetheless form an important record of what great art was believed to look like.

By choosing to re-work these paper images, I aim to point out their physical qualities: layering coloured circular stickers over the reproductions echoes the tiny mechanical dots of ink which make up the image; cutting and rearranging elements of the prints acts to reveal them as paper-thin constructs; folding parts of the images over forces an acknowledgment that the works have a front and a back; weaving these reproductions together echo the pixilation of today’s digital technologies.