83 - Vintage Original

My parents are super organised. Their garage is stacked to the eaves with labelled crates of family and work artefacts. This level of order (never quite perfect but nudging that elusive pinnacle), demands a clearing out habit. It’s a lifestyle.

This week’s reorg unearthed an artwork I created in 1995. Each of its nine panels were a touch rusty, with cobwebs and dead spiders attached. I decided to restore it which began with a scrub down. We also tackled some DIY and I did a really appalling job of replastering a small section of the bathroom ceiling.

We’re going to watch ‘A Complete Unknown’ in a minute so this complete unknown needs to finish up pronto.

This is a couple of panels packed with too many of the magnetic ‘characters’ that can be peeled off and rearranged.

Video Transcript

I'm around at my parents house this weekend, and my dad dug out some of my work and I was quite pleased to see it. And it's funny to think that this is vintage work. It's about 30 it's exactly 30 years old. They are steel plates, steel squares, tiles, you could see. And they had Velcro to fit them sticking onto the wall with.

And these things are magnets. Some here they are magnetic kind of magnetic plastic covered with glitter. This sort of glittery plastic. They're all kind of based on cartoons. They’re cartoony. They're kind of, I wanted them to appear animated. So they look animated. There's too many on this one tile. But the idea was that I'd have all these different tiles and there would be no set composition - you can have a piece going over the edge like that.

There's Mary Poppins in there somewhere. There's Mary Poppins upside down, but she's morphed into a pregnant sort of pregnant Mary Poppins with a balloon for a head. This is like one of those computer game characters. But they actually do... you can put them upside down, but they do in my head. they've got a top - there, kind of like a body.

Some of them are got wings. That was one of my favorite ones. This was like a character with a skirt that was almost like a caterpillar truck. It was a caterpillar track, or like feet. And I've got a version of my balloon character there, like a balloon headed thing. It's quite tactile. It's all of the background is spray can paint, which I used to buy from a supplier up in Camden Town.

What else. can I tell you about this? I think looking at it now with my current art head on it, I'm interested in some of the shapes, but I think I would have shapes that were more similar. So I'm quite interested in the idea of repeat patterns, but where you create some say I drew that it's like a figure with legs.

I like the way the leg becomes part of the other character's body. So it would be better if there was one leg, one leg, and then that's like the two legs joined together. So I’d kind of take that pairing and I would draw that again and again. So I had lots, but none of them are exactly the same, but it's the same kind of motif.

And then I think it would read better across the whole thing. Looking at this, I feel like they work. You almost just, just need like a couple that are related that's much more related. So it looks like that's moved from that. But it's exciting. There's a lot of energy in it and it relates very well. It relates very much to what I'm doing at the moment with I keep going back to this idea of wallpaper and figures coming to life there, being kind of coming in and out of the background, coming in and out of life.

Like I can't describe it properly, really. I don't really. I mean, if like I'm not really into worrying about putting it into words, I think just, I'm a visual artist, so, you know, I make visual things that express something, but it's not it doesn't need to be translated into words.