Process 03 Collage

Around this time, at the beginning of 2018, I was getting really into the idea of somehow letting the weather work its magic on my art. I like the look of my stickers decomposing on various London lampposts, after a year or so. Or the fading tombstones in Brompton cemetery, which I'd walked through every day on my way to work, in the run up to Christmas. So, I set up a big drawing on paper, A1 or A0 size maybe, with loads of my faces in red marker and layered it up with tracing paper. I left it propped up in the back garden and forgot about it for two weeks. Despite a couple of downpours, the picture remained frustratingly unblemished. I cut the picture up and left sections submerged in bicarbonate of soda-infused water for a week. I even tried bleach but decided that wasn't really a medium I wanted a prolonged relationship with. The change was still pretty meagre. This wasn't going to work. Instead of relying on nature, I started thinking about more immediate, man-made ways of destroying the image, of processing it like a machine would. I think using a shredder came to mind fairly quickly. I was wary of going too abstract too suddenly but, in the end, I just went with it and glued the strips back together as they fell.