Installation as an arts practice can be scary. By its very nature the finished work is made & installed into an arts space on the run up to the show Rather than a finished piece that can be moved in & hung or placed. Certain elements can be prepared beforehand, in my case all the screen printing was done weeks before install, but ultimately the work comes together in the space for the first time & it has to work. Having an idea of how it might look & having completed some previous experiments in other spaces with the materials are about enough to give some confidence that it will work.

My current work has relied on a scaffold structure being installed into the gallery before anything else could happen. Even before the structure had been installed I was not quite sure how big it would actually be & so not wanting to block all the light or dominate the space over my fellow exhibitors was a concern. Once fully erect in the space this concern subsided.

My next thought was how to attach/place/suspend/fold/drape/roll/… the work into the space with the new structure. For this there was a healthy 6 days to figure it out. Around other bits like painting walls & discussing work placements my work came together at various rates of speed. Along with suspending, folding & rolling a hundred metres of Monarflex I had a rubble bag form to make & 100 sandbags to fill, plus figure out where they would both go. In reality this installation consists of 3 parts that could be together or separate in the space.

There is a level of detail that I have brought to my work in order to maintain a cohesive motif throughout. There are small moments, flourishes in the material that have been added to soften the coldness of the material. For example the ties in the sand bags mirror the loose ends of the ratchet straps that bind the rubble bags. That floppy shoelace knot can also be seen in the orange tie of the ratchet straps that hold the Monarflex in the air, these knots are further echoed in the ripples of the Monarflex on the floor. These ornate moments bring a quality to the functional materials by adding an element not normally meant for its everyday use. These same ornate moments are exactly what architects began to eradicate in Modernist & Brutalist architecture, a form of architecture that I look to for inspiration.

Repetition is obvious in my work but it is also subtle. Screen printing on 100 sand bags is one obvious pointer to the repeat process that is used to make work as is the abundance of rubble bags with all of its handles poking out from the bale. On a low key level there is a fine weave in the material that looks to be made of endless squares of woven plastic, there are the tied ends of the ratchet straps & sand bag ties. Repeating is also played with in terms of art production & multiples of art prints. Hidden inside the scaffolding behind the Monarflex are a set of prints hanging from bungee cords. These prints can be seen through the translucent skin as they all contain a fluorescent colour layer & on close inspection are prints of well known revered brutal buildings. Printed on sheets of plastic & not paper these prints play further with use of materials & the printing process. One interesting thing about the repetition in my work is that it highlights how imperfect repetition can be.