This one is currently in the “unfinished art show” in Margate. I loved the reflections that show prompted for me last year so I am delighted to be a part of it this time.
The piece I submitted is called “literally not”, and I’ve had a fractious relationship with it, and there is an interesting process piece in that.
It illustrates a starting point in my practice that then got frozen, and now it spites me and I don’t know what to do about it. I often start the background for my prints with layering on a few colours (usually scraping it on with an old banking card). This one got torn when taking it off the board, and I got so cross I wrote on it with a marker pen (I sometimes do that, giving voice to the inner critic in my head, sometimes also on behalf of the piece commenting on itself).
The problem with that is, of course, now that thing has a voice, a quasi-sentience. Like how a Chinese dragon comes to life when you paint the eyes in. It’s now an entity, a thing in and of itself, and we’ve started a conversation, there is an emotional charge. Now I feel like I can’t just rip it up and collage it now like I do with other mishaps or early-stages or experiments. It’s too alive now to just kill it.
I also don’t know how to take it any further at this point without going full Gerhard Richter squeegee painting on it. So this exists now in suspended animation, undead, opinionating all over me, in a never ending doom cycle of projection, until infinity.
Thoughts on “finishedness” here.
The show is still on in Margate at the Pie Factory until Feb 20th.
Art by Lior Locher 