Work in Progress: James Nairne and Jill Piddock
Feb 2016: Month 2
What exactly are we looking at here?
This is a double page spread from Jill Piddock's sketchbook shared with me. She chose a Z fold concertina sketchbook made by Seawhite. Each turn of the page is A5, so this landscape spread is A4, and is pages 4, 5 6 & 7 of the 5 pages I worked on.
How many hours of work does this represent?
I tend to work on more than one page at a time and then there's thinking and drying time. But perhaps up to an hour for the production of each A5 page.
What's the initial idea behind it?
Jill had started the sketchbook with collage work that included snippets of historic art and text about starting a collaborative project but it also included part of the window from a business letter. The words 'Private & Confidential' dominated the last page. I took this as a prompt to produce work that said something about my feelings about society.
Do you like it yet? [if not, when will you know if it's a goer?]
Yeah I do like it... I don't normally do 'political' work so I am excited by this development. I like how montaging different images - often drawn from snaps taken on my phone - can create allusions to different possible meanings. I like the mix of the hand drawn and photographic, text and image.
Does this pretty much represent your normal process?
Yes. I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. It started with a coloured acrylic wash on the page and then I gather images together, some drawn and some applied using acrylic medium to transfer laser printer images. The first image here was the text from an article in the Guardian on surveillance, the second a part of a blurred photograph from my phone of a London street.
What could go wrong at this point?
I could work it too much... But most 'mistakes' are rescuable and often add to the image.
When do you know it's done?
When there a pleasing balance compositionally between the different elements.
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