'Sick 1' In Detail: 'C'

'Sick 1', 2012, Acrylics & Paper Collage on 4 Panels,
60 cm X 300 cm (Overall), 60 cm X 60 cm (Each Panel)

'Sick 1 (C)', 2012, Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel (with Sand & Plaster),
60 cm X 60 cm

The inspiration for ‘Sick 1 (C)’ came from photos I had taken of rusted industrial gates covered in graffiti.  They’re close to my Leicester home in an area that combines partial dereliction with continuing economic activity.  It includes a redundant Victorian railway station with attendant arches and a guano-encrusted bridge.  Small to medium-sized businesses trade (with mixed success) from surrounding buildings of assorted styles.  There’s a general mood of dilapidation and neglect, - of people too busy scraping a living to undertake inessential repairs and maintenance.  It appears to be a zone of making do and getting by, reflecting Britain’s status as a once-vital industrial economy fallen on hard times.

The gates bar the yard of a car repair company and are battered and heavily rusted.  I was drawn to the patterns of rust emerging through original paint overlaid by a wild calligraphy of tags and graffiti.  It leaches beautifully through the official surface coating and the aerosol swirls of outlaw writers alike and unifies them in a process of shared entropy.  As ever I’m undecided where the sickness lies.  Are these enterprises doomed to struggle in an ailing economy or adapting to colonise unpromising ground like opportunistic weeds?  Is the graffiti the only work available for the idle hands of another lost generation or evidence of an undiminished urge to find expression, however debased, outside of prescribed channels?  Is the rust a cancer consuming everything we build or a valuable reminder that we’re all just part of a larger natural process along with chemistry and physics?

With its heavy, granular texture the panel is as much a relief simulation of rust as a painterly illusion of it.  It’s built from layers of paper collage, P.V.A., acrylics, plaster and sand, drawing on my years of creating faux effects as a scenic artist.  The graffiti combines spontaneously invented motifs with elements lifted from the reference photos whilst the block C character recalls examples of dilapidated commercial signage commonly seen in the area.