(The Great Archive) Make of This What You Will: I Want to Say Things Exactly as I Mean Them...

(The Great Archive) Make of This What You Will: I Want to Say Things Exactly as I Mean Them: Look at all this crap I found, People I’ve Never Met and Stories I’ve Never been Told, How to Upset your Parents, Moderately Controversial, It’s Really None of my Business, It Doesn’t Have to be Good – It Doesn’t Have to be Right, What Exactly do I Need to Follow these Rules For?, Stories I’m Not Allowed to Tell, and Things I’m Not Supposed to Know, How to Start a Fight, Behaving Disrespectfully, Do I Remember this Right?, Enfant Terrible, Disrespect and Insolence, etc.

When one is confronted with one’s own mortality in a very real way, and then placed under a certain level of confinement (that comes hand in hand with many lockdowns), one can find oneself becoming very reflective. During the past two years of interruptions to both my education and creative process I found myself beginning to create work that investigated the artefacts that were hidden within my childhood home. I came upon a vast unsorted archive of photographs, in many different and outdated formats, along with left behind knick-knacks that my mother had chosen to keep after her father’s death two years prior. With this collection of curiosities, I started to make a body of work that took on a life of its own and evolved into a grand archive of sorts. The archive as it began was unintentional and has evolved with my awareness of it, many elements being inherited and altered over the period of nearly two years now.

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Make of This What You Will: I Want to Say Things Exactly as I Mean Them, 2021  

Installation; charcoal, graphite, ink, oil paint, watercolour, gouache, and printmaking on assorted papers, photographs, printed Labels, etc.  

dimensions variable

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Untitled, 2021

compressed willow and powdered charcoal  

500 x 700 mm

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Untitled, 2021  

graphite  

700 x 500 mm

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A Pair of Shoes, 2021  

compressed charcoal  

520 x 430 mm

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Untitled, 2021  

Polaroid photographs

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Untitled, 2021  

watercolour on board  

127 x 177.8 mm

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Untitled, 2021  

watercolour on paper  

750 x 1000 mm

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