Studio Installation, mixed media, 1996 / 97

2 images, which i think are photographs of slides projected in the studio. At this time i was doing a lot of studio scale installations, building the total environment pieces, photographing them as slides, and projecting them back onto the installation in question or some other construction in the studio. So the effect was to break up the space several times and fragment it in interesting ways. these two images are i think projected onto a blank wall however. but u get the general idea. sections of the studio were painted deep strong colors and pieces of wood and other material were used to break up and section the space. sort of painting in space, this was for the me the apex of my “structural work” and from this point i veered off into making earth works.with these installations i encouraged the viewer to physically interact with the work, in order to experience the entire room it was necessary to clamber over pallets and other obstacles stacked up in the space. These items were also painted and arranged according to my taste. i think inm the end i got tired of the profound difficulty at knowing what to take from this and how to see it beyond my studio environment. i think in many ways it was more an incubatory for me to find a way of working more so than an end result. that said, this is exactly the type of large scale installation i’d like to find a way to produce. later on in carbondale the unfolding sculptures were an attempt to create an easily deployable module that unfolded could produce a level of spatial fragmentation like these pieces. i think that one recurring theme in all my work, and with holly too, has been portability. from time to time i make works that are patently impossible to move easily and these pieces are the flip side of the drive towards mobility. but i keep coming back to this MANPORT / MANPAD production. …. hmmm. (p.s. sorry about all the dust, i need ot clean the scanner).

Studio Installation, mixed media, 1996 / 97

Studio view, 1995

My first year at LCAD i shared a room in the halls of residence with Andrew Poulter. Andy went on to do his MA at Chelsea College of Art in London then disappear off the face of the earth. His paintings were clemente-esqe and u can see one of them to the left nestled between the larger blue canvas on the right nad the tree of the left. i was utterly lost at this point in my art practice and was borrowing from Andy a bit in terms of figurative stuff, hence the blue canvas on the wall. i guess the arm is “reaching” for something… a figure that seems to be backing away. maybe i knew this figurative stuff wasn’t for me at the time and this painting tells truth. who knows… but i loved the fact we painted in there 24 hours a day all the time to the banging sounds of the KLF, 808 State and any acid house tape Andy could lay his hands on. I think for a while we had every tape, LP and bootleg CD of the KLF in all it’s various guises and would belt them out much to the chargrin of our neighbors i think. the lights we always low and the curtains drawn. Andy painted in these super bright colors but when u took his canvases outside to transport them to school for crits they were like sun beams, painfully bright….. the tree was dragged in one night, i think i wanted to draw from nature so instead of leave the studio we brought nature inside, albeit a dead tree. i think we kept it till pretty much the end of the year. when we moved out we filled the holes in the walls with cotton wool and covered them with paper and corn flakes to simulate the wall paper…. Andy if u r out there and u find this post email me: tom@tomburtonwood.com