Many of the works in Some Wear are derived from a selection of photographs of some rather unremarkable things - marks ground into and written upon the surfaces of my surroundings, small sites of wear, impact, and abrasion. Translating my compendium of paint chips, scratch marks, scribbles and scrawls gathered from the urban environment, I have magnified, repeated, overlayed and embellished simple shapes with indecorous layers of hand-cut, and machine-cut pattern in signwriters vinyl. I am interested in elevating mundane, ordinary things to visibility, and through these recent works, I have sought to reimagine the mundane, as lavish.
Through the choice of signwriters vinyl, I have embraced the limitation of working with a restricted palette of colour. Whilst there are many colours to choose from, unlike working with paint colours, to create these works I have exploited the optical qualities of the manufactured vinyls, arranging the discordant, bright, and fluorescent colours I have chosen. This is aimed primarily at playfully creating ‘visibility’ for the unseen, or unnoticed things, that underpin the works as their source imagery.
I have aimed to rebuild the forlorn marks of wear as extravagant motifs, combined with pattern in pure, glossy, and fluorescent colour. Informing this collection of works is the idea that the most ordinary aspects of lived experience can become the catalyst through which extraordinary manifestations of the unseen, unnoticed everyday are revealed. Through the construction of detailed and visibly insistent collages, I have sought to recast specific yet unnoticed traces of the everyday, to create a representation that is lavish, and fictional, yet authentically indexed to the original images from which the works derive.
- Steven Carson
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