Subject to Change presents new works by the joint winners of the prestigious President’s Prize, awarded to Paul Bonomini, Maybelle Peters and Linda Simon for their submissions to The London Group’s 2019 Open Exhibition.
The London Group is the UK’s longest-running artists’ co-operative, founded in 1913 with the aim of creating an independent artist-led exhibiting body to counterbalance institutional biases.
Subject to Change - Installation view
For this joint exhibition I created a series of interconnected works derived from safety mesh of the kind commonly found on building sites.
Limbo
Eleven sheets of yellow plastic safety mesh are suspended from a grid to create a hanging sculpture.
According to Roman Catholic theology, Limbo is a term used to describe an intermediate state or transitional situation characterized by uncertainty. It is a place or state of imprisonment or confinement, a suspended state that that exists between heaven and hell.
What began as purely an architectural material intervention is now intertwined with feelings experienced during the pandemic. The safety mesh recalls the temporary barriers that were imposed upon all of us during lockdown; the feelings of containment as well as the protection afforded by the confinement to our homes. However, with this particular bright yellow sheeting there are also instant associations with the sun and the almost tangible sense of light and hope that it conjures.
Wildflowers
Wildflowers is an installation of 21 wall-mounted cubes lining the upper gallery. Each cube is constructed from a sheet of cyanotype printed paper exposed using the same yellow mesh as used in Limbo. Cyanotype is an alternative photographic printing process that involves treating the surface with chemicals and through exposure to the sun produces a Prussian blue print. In this case, prints are created by placing the yellow mesh over the paper. When exposed to sunlight the mesh acts as a barrier and results in a blue and white grid.
Like many people during lockdown my attention was drawn to the details in my immediate area and I became obsessed with identifying the wildflowers (or weeds) growing in my garden. The cyanotype grids reminded me of punch cards, a mechanism used by both the Jacquard loom and early computers that utilised a system of holes to store information. This led to the decision to translate the name of each wildflower into a binary sequence of 0s and 1s to inform the placement of the cut-outs and thus encode the name of a wildflower within each cube.
The arrangement of the cubes on the wall echoes the opening notes of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers.
Sun Flower
Rather than discard the cut-outs from the wildflower cubes I used them to create a three-dimensional sunflower. The blue cut-outs are arranged in the Fibonacci sequence, a pattern that occurs in both nature and mathematics. The spirals found within the seed head of a sunflower are formed using the Fibonacci sequence. If you count the spirals turning clockwise and counter-clockwise you will usually find a pair of numbers that sit side by side in the Fibonacci sequence… 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 etc
