Cell

Cell
1997

Media: dye-sublimation print on ceramic tiles, 

Size: 990 x 550 x 250mm

Exhibited:

2008 – Locations (one-person exhibition), OVADA, Oxford. 

1997 – “…from the institution." (one-person exhibition), Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery.

About this work:

Cell, (1997) occupies an uncertain territory between object and image, operating at more than one remove. The work started life as a particular object, stitched by hand from small pieces of red satin and ribbons. Less than satisfied with the substantiality of the material object itself, I developed the work by photographing it, experimenting with the fixing of its soft materiality through static imagery, and the potential for a change in scale and placement offered by the medium. This proved a positive decision, but a sense of resolution to the work remained elusive.  Eventually I decided to return the image to a more tangible materiality by printing it onto a multi-part ceramic tiled surface. This was done through a process, using dye-sublimation prints, heat, pressure and specially treated ceramic tiles. The result of this technique used in Cell, is a making-strange union of a clinical, sanitary surface, across which a richly coloured image/form flows. The change of scale afforded by the process enables the original object to be read in differing ways. The image suggests that the object is ecclesiastical, a vestment worn by the few and mysterious to the many perhaps? But equally there is the suggestion of an erotic quality to the image—is it lingerie? And yet, there is a possibility that the enlarged image is something we cannot even see with the naked human eye, that we are peering at an image from a microscope, something bacterial perhaps? The coincidental connections of the medical, clerical and sensual are extended by the differing meanings of the work’s title Cell.