So what is an Abstract Head for? It's a formal piece of enquiry, based on a human head. It's about abstracting from, a rather old-fashioned idea, that quickly went out of fashion as abstract came to mean something quite different. But I rather like the idea that my work comes from the same evolutionary line as Picasso, Braque and Mondrian, though following its own direction now. There are some rules, but they change and evolve over time, rather like a face itself. It's the same face, only different. Some unchangeable rules are:
1. Triptych. The purpose of the triptych is two fold - to give the form of the head space to breath, to adapt within its own space; and to make the spectator move. Not very much, but certainly their eyes have to move, from canvas to canvas. I didn't realise this at the time, but now that I know I have peculiar eyes, I realise this may be because I have difficulty looking at one thing at a time, and prefer to keep my eyes moving all the time.
2. Size and shape. Each canvas is 40x40 cm. The point of the square is that I didn't want to use a rectangle that would be either landscape or portrait. Whilst the human head is not, usually, square, I wanted to ensure that there was no sense of a landscape, nor of a complete human body in the work.
The first series of Abstract Heads was full of colour, the whole canvas being covered with paint. But then I looked at one "unfinished" triptych and realised that it was, in fact, "finished".
This has led to series two, where only some of the forms are used to create the triptych. This, I feel, increases the formal quality of the work, as its basis in a human face is very much less present.
This formality has led me on in my exploration, using devices such as moulding plaster, constructing mobiles, use of wire, curving the flat form into a cylinder, embossing and printing.
My current exploration of Walter Benjamin is guiding me towards the ideas of the flâneur, the feuilleton and fashion; with further forays into Black Swan Theory. And so, I am going to take my sculptures for a walk, create radical and seditious editions of "newspaper" styled artworks, and be thoroughly unfashionable. How much this will work remains to be seen.
