Working Methods: 'This S(c)eptic Isle' - Abandoned Toy Sculptures 1

All Images: Abandoned Toy Sculptures (Work In Progress), Salvaged Trundle Toys & Spray Enamel,
May 2018

As I mentioned recently, my current focus has shifted to a form of sculpture, using found 'street' materials.  However, nothing I do ever seems to settle into any pure form, and so it is again.  The materials I’m currently utilising, such as the cardboard boxes mentioned a couple of posts back, are definitely recognisable as such – and there’s no doubt they’ve all be salvaged ‘pre-used’ from one source or another.  However, there’s also a fair bit of subtle ‘tidying up’ and finessing of nuanced surfaces, going on.  A deal of consideration is also being applied to what will become their ultimate formal arrangements, and to the structural issues involved in realising them in a (semi-) permanent form.  And so, as ever, I seem to be falling between two stools.  For better or worse, these are shaping up to become specific artefacts, rather than the raw materials of a transitory site-specific installation.  Perhaps I might need to think a bit more deeply about that, if I choose to continue working in this manner in the future.

A similar situation is developing with the discarded trundle toys shown here.  They constitute another of my current key recurring motifs, and I’ll leave it up to the viewer to decide whether each might signify youth abandoned, dysfunction as transportation (all are damaged or rendered unusable in some way), or a sense of a coherent way forward being lost.  Or, of course - they might just represent another picturesque component of the street trash accumulating in local streets.

Either way, they might have simply been carted into an exhibition situation in their raw state, I suppose - to glory in their authentic tawdriness.  But, as with the boxes, it seems my natural instinct is to pour hours of labour into transforming them into something a little closer to ‘sculpture’.  Various structural interventions have already been wrought, and considerable effort put into prepping their scarred surfaces prior to painting.  In fact, this decision to spray-paint each one a single uniform colour is one of the things which will distinguish them from ‘pure’ Readymades in the Duchampian sense.  And whilst Rauschenberg usually manipulated his free standing Combines in a some physical, sense, he generally left their surfaces in their street-raw state (or close to it).  That more self-consciously sculptural aspect may also be accentuated in the long run, by furnishing the finished toys with plinths – even if only in the form of yet more cardboard boxes.  We’ll see.

So, it’s apparent that, even when working with street detritus, my default disposition is towards rather more control than one might ideally aspire to.  So be it – we all revert to the kind of artist we really are, come what may - and the urge to deliberately shape is clearly pretty strong in me.  And, in all honesty, it’s actually quite therapeutic sitting in my sunny back yard - obsessively sanding the scarred wheels of a plastic kiddie-car (whatever the neighbours might think).