This Paper Chain began with two rolls of tape
Link 1: Val Bolsover
The initial materials were two small reels of tape: one grey, one orange. Given that I would not have my usual equipment and space, I experimented with patterns, and quickly decided to make some kind of construction kit. This could be flat packed for postage, and then rebuilt in any way the next collaborator (Sonia) chose. Reflecting on construction kits I’d used previously I wanted to make slits to join pieces, but using card meant the pieces only tolerated one slit – plastic would have allowed several.
I played with the kit and made numerous sculptures which was fun and photographed them. I provided a “serving suggestion” photo for Sonia to clarify the purpose of the pieces.
Link 2: Sonia Griffin
I used MacDonald pots to form the shapes, ( love the pots would like to do something with the post) but this time chose to open them out and use, as Val did to form a larger object.
I hung them with a pin and a bulldog clip or a heins tomato sauce bottle top.
I did two versions one and first just simple white and the other with Val shapes – well a few of them.
Link 3: Karen Gardner
I received the packet sent by Sonia of catsup cups deconstructed and reconstructed using the same gesture of Val’s original discs. Included in the package I received was a Heinz catsup bottle cap, its diameter exactly matching Val’s discs. I assumed that the cap came from Val and inspired Sonia. So Heinz catsup it had to be. I squirt drew with catsup, wrote in it, photographed and scanned it. Then I used the same gesture of construction Val had started, a slot into slot as that of a paper airplane’s tail. A very basic 3-D form. I packaged the lot as a kit and sent it back to Val.
Link 4: Val Bolsover
Two weeks and two collaborators later the parcel arrived. I was interested to see what kind of journey the kit had taken. Sonia had introduced paper ketchup pots and continued to interlock pieces. Karen had interlocked new shapes to make model planes, using the ketchup bottle image for the fuselage and decorating the wings with ketchup streaks. I liked the continuing humour and play in these developments and at first wondered if I could make some ketchup splodge mark products for the planes eg sick bags!!
The ketchup planes became the stimulus for a story of some kind, not a children’s book “Ketchie the plane”, something darker perhaps. And so the plane crash story evolved, after all the planes were probably not going to be especially aerodynamic. I wanted to write a news story and feature the Heinz company. I researched plane crashes and based the articles on a factual story. Much of the initial text was taken from a news reel. The little boy was indeed a survivor of that crash, but of course the doomed Heinz cousins (all named after tomato varieties) were completely fictitious. In presenting two versions of the story from the newspapers the morning after the crash in a scrapbook format the story is extended: who would have kept these cuttings? The Buddy Holly story is an interesting and true twist – a small crash on the same day is widely remembered, but the more devastating crash is forgotten .
Link 5: Katie Hayward
Ketchup Shotput
Link 6: Ruth Payne
Having received a large parcel of disparate, apparently unrelated objects, made & found, I had absolutely no grasp of what they were or what to do with them. In my confusion, it seemed like a game to which no-one had given me the rules. So I adapted some of the pieces, named them & packaged them up as a bizarre game. The game was designed to be played whenever the group met up again, establishing the rules as we went along, via any means necessary…… The piece is completed by participants playing the game, being different every time
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