This Paper Chain began with a cardboard box
Link 1: Jo Brown
I love the colour of the card, pale buff/beige. Having visited Kettle’s Yard house and gallery in Cambridge last weekendI was thinking about using soft neutral colours to paint on it, such as the paintings and ceramics exhibited there.However, I decided to use a section of a painting I have just completed, using strong vibrant colours.
Link 2: Dawn Adams
My first instinct with the painted flat box was to put it together. The image would then be trapped inside. It was too dark inside the box to even peep in & see. So I decided not to put it together but instead to pull the box apart, into five pieces.
Link 3: Rosalind Barker
My initial thoughts revolved around rejoining the segments of the box with delicate lines extended across the voids of white mount board. Potentially using thread or fine colour pens to create a linear connection between the solid masses that would reflect the texture and colour and then remove the reconnected box from the board.
The strength and volume of glue made it impossible to remove the support.
My thoughts then turned to the box that had been disassembled and rendered in opposition of its primary function. What if I had a box that was sealed?
Working with newspapers on a daily basis I decided to create a sellotaped box that held unknown to it’s viewer, the remnants of the news stories represented on its exterior. It would be a time capsule of the week that I spent on the project.
I selected to use extra wide adhesive tape partly to move my experimentation forward and also to engage with many larger scale images in the papers.
The remnants left after the lifting were enclosed inside the box and the week was so overwhelming in the volume of extraordinary world events that I decided to add a brief synopsis of the weeks events from the Sunday Times……. in some ways this detracted from the mystery of the time capsule if it was ever opened
The week coincided with the commemoration of the start of World War 1. The constant reflections of 100 years of peace in Europe jarred with the actuality of rampant war with Boka haram, Isis, Hamas, Israel and Putin all involved in major war atrocity.
Britain had Boris standing for parliament, the potential separation of Scotland with the first television broadcast of Salmon v Darling and the threat of laughing gas as the new substance to abuse. Art this week was represented by Art Angels ‘Spectra’ and ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ the 800,000 ceramic poppies installation at the Tower of London.
Ebola started to spread across neighboring African boarders. A minority ethnic group called the Yazidis were being decapitated, crucified and buried alive by Isis who had them trapped on a mountain.
The two inch tape drawings were then used to completely encase and seal the box.
Link 4: Alison Berry
I received two pieces of work in the post and ended up responding to mainly one of them: a small cardboard box with fragments of faces cellotaped to the outside. The box contained newspaper cuttings from which the faces had originated.
Extracted from the text of the newspaper articles the faces were for me still loaded with narrative. Although in many ways a situation in reverse, this brought back memories of David Birkin’s powerful work PIETÀ 2012 which consisted of a news article with the accompanying photo of a grieving Afghanistan mother blocked out by lapis lazuli paint.
In an experimental move I decided to roughly white wash over the text of all 36 pages of The Daily Telegraph newspaper leaving only the faces visible. The date, Tuesday 12 August 2014 and the page numbers were also kept to maintain the newspaper format and to fix the faces in newspaper time and space. The juxtaposition of faces in such different emotional states on the same page without any explanatory text highlighted the unintentional callous nature of news reporting. On the front page the traumatised face of a young boy can be seen with faces of three girls laughing. The boy is in fact from Iraq and has been caught up in the violent upheaval caused by extreme Islamic militants while the girls are Brownies and are modelling their newly designed uniforms. With the rough maelstrom of white paint surrounding faces of all shapes and sizes and experiences throughout the newspaper, the work for me also suggested how we are at the mercy of events outside our control.
Link 5: Karen Gardner
The paper is heavy with the white acrylic seal, done on both sides. Turning the pages is an interesting experience…the size, the weight. It would make a nice cover for a homeless person, but I don’t know of any that would allow me to photograph them.
My work on the pages is evident. I began with embossed writing, my personal news of the day, as a letter to my mother. It’s an account of going to meet my American girlfriends in London at Marina Abramovic’s exhibition at the Serpentine. I pressed the pen down hard to imprint onto the paper Alison had prepared. Then I tested if it could be revealed with CSI style dusting – graphite. No good. So I went with expressionism using masking tape and graphite and notebook paper. I even used images made by the young boy on the train ride home that inspiring day to London. He let me buy the altered newspaper he was working on to pass the time. He didn’t work as hard as we do, so £3. was the deal.
I left almost all the faces exposed, only altered a couple. There is nothing other than the story of that day to meet my girlfriends that carries the art of this piece – news, not of people I don’t know, but of people I met, encountered and revealed to my mother in my weekly writing to her.
Link 6: Jo Brown
I have simply drawn a copy of a Cubist head by Picasso on the back page. He drew it on a sheet of newspaper, in Paris. If I had more time I would like to have added more cubist heads.
I think the treated newspaper is a beautiful object in itself.
Link 7: Lindsay Connors
The heads floating in the white paper look like little balloons. I find a cluster and give them shiny little birds attached with red thread, to carry them away.
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