open studio

Open Studio
Thomas Jeppe, Nathan Gray and Mark Rodda
warehouse at the rear of 672 nicholson street north fitzroy
tuesday 19th 6pm and therafter by appointment (email)

To end the year I will be exhibiting a new piece, a work consisting of abandoned ceramics, screen printed, dyed and marbled paper, plasticine, t-shirts, power cables, lighting and materials for the scraps bins at my day job. Everyone is invited not just friends, if you want to come along feel free.

I'm calling it "Aggregation 5; On This Joyous Occasion".Here's how I've approached the piece so far.

Using the basic functions it needs to fulfill i.e. lighting and display as a starting point and framework, the racks and power cables are used to support a construction made from numerous small scale 3 and 2 dimensional sketches and experiments. I intend this to become, by weight of numbers something else, as when spores become a mould. I want to ornament the necessary and then extrude this ornamentation out into space touching upon and connecting, objects and architectural features.

I'm also connecting different areas of my creative work. Using screen prints made as demonstrations, experiments with new techniques and T-shirts made for commercial purposes. Incorporating scraps, offcuts and discarded student work, reclaiming and exhibiting uncollected ceramics pieces in amongst my own.

I want to leave the convention of presenting pieces in isolation for the clutter common in "outsider art" for want of a better term, maybe spacious presentation is a claim to rationality by artists. Its not appropriate when this work is a fantasy; the fiction that functional objects could be parasitised by living ornaments. The central technique to these aggregations is that no part is central, all parts have equal importance (or unimportance) and the strength of the work is in its complexity.

whew, well that does me for the night....

ciao N