Wednesday 17 January 2018

Work In Progress: 'This S(c)eptic Isle': 'Flags' 4




Untitled, Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel & French Polish On Paper,
40 cm X 60 cm, 2018


After a bit of consideration, I decided to push on with my paper-based flag pieces – with a view to rounding the series out at ten.  Here, then, is number nine.

One of the greatest dangers with consciously working in series like this, is obviously that of empty repetition.  It definitely feels important to keep looking back across the group in its entirety and ask, “am I just going through the same motions? – is anything else being stated?”  In this case, there are certainly plenty of motifs and manoeuvres carrying over from version to version, but I feel there’s also enough variation and progression to keep me (at least) interested.  Each feels like it broke a little bit of new ground as the series developed – often picking up from where it’s predecessor left off.  I’m pretty confident I can take sufficient pleasure in doing violence to the flag once more, to complete the tenth.




There is actually some method in my working towards the round number.  Since reaching some degree of resolution with my ‘Below The Line / Beneath Contempt’ text, I’ve been considering ways it might be presented - in an exhibition context, for instance.  One, hopefully attainable, method might be to do it via video.  My current thought is that these flag images might form a potential background to such a piece – something which would accord with my interests in self-reflexivity and the recycling of existing content through different media.  Should that idea be realised, a series of ten images would appear to fit well with the five-act structure in which ‘BTL/BC’ currently resides.




As the titles of these related posts suggest, I’ve remained reluctant to regard these particular pieces as definitive statements, and have tended toward the view that they should ultimately carry some form of text in their physical state too.  However, as I near completion of the series, and can see them together on the wall, I’m moving away from that notion.  My prosed video would surely satisfy that textual itch more than adequately, and a lesson I’d do well to learn is that individual pieces need not aspire to doing everything all at once.




Maybe it’s also the result of looking repeatedly at Jasper Johns’ own glorious painted flags, in recent months.  Johns was, of course, a master of deadpan presentation, and of nuancing and recontextualising the found and the familiar so that the viewer’s own interpretations might flood in.  My current body of work under the banner, ‘This S(c)eptic Isle’, isn’t short of implied agendas (least of all, ‘BTL/BC’) but it was never my intention to merely trumpet my own particular viewpoint unequivocally.  The work betrays more than a little queasiness over issues of jingoism, national identity, post-referendum angst, social division, etc. – it’s true.  But my intention was always more to reflect the woeful infantilisation of current public/political debate, than to push a single, over-simplified agenda.  The damaged psychology, societal neurosis, and cultural divisions currently framing our lives, are ultimately of more interest in themselves than partisan polemics alone.  For that reason - my current instinct is that, in their physical form, these flag images might be best left to stand as they are.




Clearly, a degree of creative uncertainty (let’s be generous and call it flexibility) continues to characterise my process.  But, if 2017 sometimes felt a bit overwhelmed by indecision, I already sense a greater degree of resolution coming into view as the work moves deeper into 2018.




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