In this group exhibition curated by John Bunker and myself, we explored collage and multiple layering as an archaeology of making in contemporary painting. As a cut and paste deformation of the term 'natural fibres', the selected artists court traditions and styles in painting yet activate the tendencies in collage and abstraction that lean toward a base materiality or a matter of fact process of addition and subtraction. They atomise, raise or rip apart 'naturalised' or normalised genres or ideas about painting and its histories only to reconfigure and reconstruct them with new formulations.
Collage now is a ubiquitous visual tool that has permeated almost every level of visual culture including new digital realms. Abstraction's history of signs is mired in rhetoric. Stretched and contrary, it harbours the icons of the most esoteric of visual cultures and utopian ideals but also, the screen based slick signage of web sites, smart phones and bank logos.
By employing these contrary and conflicted languages of collage and abstraction, each artist pressurises and reinvenst painting in mediums both consistent with and anterior to its foundational wisdoms. They use collage's abrupt changes of speed, printed media, hard edges and repetition- often combining or colliding these elements with the material plasticity peculiar to paint and painting.
My contribution consisted of a re-worked painting that included Cat 5 digital cabling threaded through drilled holes in the surface. These cables, apart from acting as digitally referenced readymades, also became an additional sculptural/drawn element. The relations between the flat layering of the surface of the painting, contrasted with the 'spilling out' of the physical cables into the gallery space create a painting that extends into the gallery.
Artists: Dominic Beattie, John Bunker, Peter Lamb, Michael stubbs, Vicky Wright
