A note about altering

I’m very aware that the works that use historical or formerly living objects give rise to difficult questions, so this may address them, in part.

Working on site-specific projects such as Touch (2000) at Wolverhampton, and Mr & Mrs Walker have moved (1998) at Kettle’s Yard, depended on a full engagement with the site/object in order to make work that would say something meaningful and stimulating.  That engagement, the digging into the nature of the subject, necessarily affects the place, and changes it for the artist and the viewer.  For me, the process of living at Kettle’s Yard removed some of the delight, spoiled the idyll if you like.  Touching the surface of the painting in Touch brought to the forefront the “thing” of the painting, as it was meant to, disrupting the illusion of three-dimensionality.

But these interventions can be undone, forgotten, ignored.  They do not leave a lasting mark that removes and replaces part of the object.  The altered samplers, the engraved, burned, pinned or written-on natural or historical objects do, and the alteration is both the content and the medium of the artwork.  These works are made with a considerable amount of thought beforehand.  One should not undertake lightly the process of carving text onto a 70 million year old fossil; perhaps one should not lightly undertake this on any form of stone, or any other non-regenerating surface.  In the introduction to the Samplers works, and the interview with Lucy Chapman I discussed how acts of creative destruction have been established within the history of western art over the past 100 years, and arguably outside “high art” for millennia before that, in the use of fossils for decoration, the idea of the palimpsest, and the recycling of building materials.

As an artist I irrevocably change the world with every mark I make, just as I do as a human being every time I switch on a light, or flush my toilet, or buy a chicken sandwich.  My being able to carve text onto a commercially mined fossil, or write on a shop-bought quail’s egg, or alter the text on an auctioned sampler, tells us something about how we have conspired to parcel the world up into commodities of varying status.  But more importantly for me it allows me to raise and discuss questions about what we project onto these objects; this alone for me provides justification for the work.