SKINT
an installation in the making
THE FRIEZE in the making
"... this magnificent frieze you've created is truly a dazzling display of shapes, lines and colors. I find in it intuitions from your earlier works, but also and above all the expression of a totally new pictorial and physical language. Social issues are the theme, but its intuitive structure, rhythms and traces of bodily energy also remind me of the writing of a show, with its outbursts and silences".
Pascal Jacob
collector
Detail SKINT frieze in the making
SKINT frieze: 68 metres of panels on the walls and floor on the theme of human deprivation.
To deal with this subject and not be sucked into the devastation of its overpowering presence, I have been desperately searching for hacks; how to look at, meet, see, face the hard stuff in society and not be dragged down by it…
This has made me more determined to do the opposite; seek delight in small things and cultivate beauty repeatedly.
Detail SKINT frieze in the making
When I met Bernard Hare, the author of “Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew” in Leeds last year, I realized that poverty wasn't all doom and gloom; there are laughs, helping one another, anarchy and risk taking, all elements that make us more alive, more human.
PERFORMANCE AT THE ORIGINE OF THE SKINT FRIEZE
I don't wish to bypass hard realities and devastation, but I'm looking for solutions, more inner than outer, around generational poverty consciousness and deprivation, including my own (mis)conceptions.
Studio view with cardboard mountain, Prison Angel (left) and SKINT frieze in progress
My approach to this painting is to unbridle control and let the work happen in the intensity of the moment with a hypervigilance around fake gestures and ideas. My own raw truth, getting to the bone…
“Seeing a painting is not as rewarding as seeing a painting in production. So I want to build the process into the work to have the work exist in several stages, and to have the metamorphosis available to the viewers so that they can engage in different ways”
Mark Dion
American conceptual artist