Block Tone Collage

0. Need to include drapery development from week one, which I used as starting point.

1. 3D drawing, toilet paper, rubber bands – wanted to pile up folds of the paper, one over the other, the rubberbands give it a centralised support with the weight of the folds evenly spread – could go more ambitious in terms of scale (would need bigger rubber bands). Minimal material, everyday, household, mono-tonal yet offers quite a lot.
2. In response I wanted to continue to explore the textural/tonal qualities of multiple black media through collage (biro, marker, graphite, charcoal, rubbed out graphite – all on white paper). While preparing the charcoal and rubbed-out textures I began playing with the detritus that gathered on my desk – a developmental drawing task with potential – make a 2D drawing, rub it out, make a 3D drawing with rubber shavings or charcoal powder, make a 2d drawing, etc. Used stanley blade because its well suited to curves – more so than scissors or tearing. Whites becoming smudged by charcoaly fingers – first feeling was slight irritation, I could work against it if I want but not feeling the urge maybe I can’t be bothered or maybe it doesn’t matter if whites aren’t 100% clean. Glue and charcoal combined to make a dark salve on my fingers – a new medium to use – glue becomes an important aspect of the collage. I’m finding the darkest tone of paper (charcoal) is working well to frame the toilet paper subject – shadow and negative space crucial to giving a composition structure/giving an object form. Took about 2 hours – I like it, it’s flat, not much depth so varying tones of tissue folds maybe not effectively reproduced. Has become more about negative space and shape defined by blocks of tone. Could try a collage with only blank and charcoal covered paper – the smudging adds a nice white outline to the dark shapes.
3. I made a development booklet/zine out of the cut into pieces of paper – a negative account of the collage – idea for the zine came after the collage but could easily switch the order round – an explanation of the collage and a work in its own right. Is the zine 3D or 2D? since it has multiple, intersecting layers – space is created in the zine by the cut out areas overlapping. Or is it just a series of 2D works stapled together? The zine is a negative document of the collage – the most used page in the collage is the least visible in the zine and the least used page for the collage is the most visible.

Erasure

This developed drawing was a continuation from previous experiments with erasure and concealment. I tried to sustain engagement with this by outlining what I wanted to do in terms of process and time allocation. I began with a drawing from week one which I thought had a variety of marks and degrees of impressions into it – in hindsight it doesn’t have much of a range, nor does it use a range of media, which may have been interesting (Rauschenberg had to rub out all sorts, but it did take him a month). After rubbing out the work I then arranged the rubbings on my desk to draw from – for drawing I used a 9B and 4H in alternate hands, beginning by giving myself 4 minutes. I then gave myself 4 minutes to rub out what I had drawn before documenting then starting the process again only with half the time for both drawing and rubbing out (2 minutes). I thought by reducing the time I would be forced to make harder and harder marks into the page and that some areas might have been left unrubbed-out but rubbing out always took less time than drawing because the rubber has greater area of contact with the page. To make it increasingly hard to rub out the pencil marks I began holding each pencil like a knife and fork, applying pressure vertically. Some stages I forgot to document but general idea can be understood from above slideshow.

Map Drawings

I don’t feel like any of these are resolved – why?