User:Alice

Palm Tree

WHAT? A made fake pot plant. An appropriation of a palm tree, of a height of one and a half metres. It's skeletal composition is of a found bent steel pol, that makes up the trunk. And the leaves are structured out of wire loops. Modrock has been used to mould the composite elements into a plam tree like object. It has then been painted in brown and green, and placed in a pot. This tree then became part of a larger installation named, "Modrock Plantation".

HOW AND WHY? My interest was to make a sculpture out of found source material, and then to use craft to make it more "glamorous". The attention has been paid to the facade of the object in particular. A similar method to the way I had been making paintings. Pot plants are natural sculptures already and so it is fun to make a sculpture of something that is already considered a sculpture. Thereby the point of the artwork is to look and comment at what already exists around us.

Paintings of Waverly

WHAT? Two inherited cemi-circular boards of wood, each about an inch in thickness. They were cut from one circle, so share the same diameter of one and a half metres, and can connect together in a number of ways. Painted on the front surfaces of both boards, are imagery made from photogrpahs that I took whilst visiting my Grandad in Waverly, Johannesburg. They are not directly representational psintings, as certain shapes have been repeated, and lines extended. The other sides of the boards are painted with more abstract forms.

HOW AND WHY? My grandfather's house - a complete late 1960's timewarp, was interesting source material to me. What interested me in particular, is the matching and mirroring used in the interior design of the house, and of others in that period. Something that has been lost to some extent in our present day aesthetics of how we decorate our homes. So therfore using two canvases that were able to mirror eachother made perfect sense. The fact that the semi-circles are painted on both sides is relevant in order for the paintings to be objects that can be moved around aswell as just being paintings. Due to their shapes' they hint at being furniture like, only completely obsolete in any practical purpose.

Monitor

WHAT? A simple black monitor the dimensions of a standard TV. On it plays a series of 15 still images, that remain on the screen for 8 seconds, and are shown in a loop. The images are analog photogrpahs taken of an installation, and the surrounding interiors of where the installation happened. The installation was the aforementioned "Modrock Plantation" which consisted of a series of made plants, abstracted pot casts, and some paintings. The space of this happening was a warehouse.

HOW AND WHY? The idea of re-working a piece of art into another piece happens frequently in my work. Particularily when it comes to collaboration - these photogrpahs of my work were taken by somonelse. That persons viewpoint was obviously an edited view of my work, and then my working them into a slideshow enabled me to re-edit their selection. Other than the general idea of documentation, the point of the monitor was to encapsulate the original installation in as filmic manner as possible. The intrinsic nostalgia of analogue photogrpahs is something that I am personally afraid of working with directly, and yet I love their quality of visual representation. Therefore this manner of using somonelse's photographs enabled me to conquor my fear and use the medium for my own gain!