The Recovery Positions
Roxy: “so, now for the awkward part....Recently we have been digitally manipulating our handmade collaborative drawings into new designs for sculpture using digitally printed polyester satin and working with automotive paint over glazed ceramics (FACT!). Our works often reside where the boundaries of painting, sculpture and drawing converge or collapse.”
Paddy: “Not sure about that last sentence. Is it more like, when you are totally entwined with someone and you have a argument, but it turns out later that you both think the other person caused it? Like that, but between the 2D and the 3D. Or the painting and the sculpture or the surface and the form.
Roxy: “Totes.”
Paddy: ‘Lost my shape. Trying to act casual.’ That’s David Byrne right?
Roxy: Right, quite appropriate! My thyroid has definitely been losing it’s shape recently also, hopefully those synthetic hormones are going to help. Its definitely been influencing something within the forms of these sculptures. I was thinking of how the fabrics and the ceramics were made side by side and how the process of layering our drawings in photoshop (to make the fabric designs) began to influence the way that we dealt with the ceramics.
Paddy: Yes, which we sloppily dipped in glaze, often at random, with the outcomes becoming the basis for the painting we did on top.
Roxy: It wasn't long before it all just started to overlap and elements were combined. Just when something could be left alone it was transformed into something else.
Paddy: I think there was a conflation of sorts but not a seamless one. This kind of conflation between mediums which to me is a bit more like how now everything from shower gel to to a beefburger can share the latest boutique flavours. There’s a pleasure in that lack of definition that sharing of process. It could be seen negatively as a will to a reduced existence or sharing of character, but it’s a more complicated and layered existence than that.
Roxy: Yeah, it can also be a positive thing, an embracing of fluidity. Or seeing the confusing, superabundance of today’s world as a cause for laughter and jubilation. But I think that we are also trying to work through these times of us all creating content, existing in some kind of trancelike state, clicking, commenting and being devoured by this constant activity. This dangerous enjoyment of being devoured.
Paddy: The original drawings we did varied, some were like odd landscapes or of intimate moments but then we decided to kind of obliterate them with the making of the fabrics. So as a viewer you have no real understanding of this original content. I mean who really wants this content anyway, apart from us?
Roxy: Well we just created some other content by cutting it all up, compressed it into something else. The fabric sculptures seem to me like costumes for big doodles.
Paddy: I think the ceramics are playing dress up, all accessorised. The paint takes on a sensibility akin to makeup, a cosmetic revamping of a ceramic object that is really a variation on a kind of vessel. But one with no base.
Roxy: Yeah, trouble holding some stuff in... I mean, we’re all playing dress up, particularly in making Art. Like Brian Eno says on pretension “..pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.”
Paddy: Should we mention anything else?
Roxy: Erm at the last show someone mentioned that gilliam film Brazil.
Paddy: Lets leave em with that.
*Talking Heads song- ‘Crosseyed and Painless’, 1980.
*Taken from ‘Brian Eno’s diary. A year with swollen appendices’, p381, 1996.
“The Recovery Positions” RMAC, New Mexico, USA, 2015
This exhibition presented some of our works made during our year long residency on the Roswell Artist in Residency Program (known as the ‘gift of time’) undertaken 2015-2016. Three pieces were aquired for the Anderson Museum’s collection and are currently on display.
Roswell Museum Exhibition Brochure
