DAVID R WATSON

A video piece developed from The Inscrutable Language of Toys, for the Exhibition “Put Away Childish Things?” at the Blyth Centre for Music and Visual Arts, Imperial College, London. Drawing on the essential arbitrariness and abstractness of the rules of games, the piece also looks back nostalgically to early video games such as “Pong”.

I am often struck by the abstractness of toys made for the pre-linguistic child. Once a child starts to acquire language toys seem to quickly take on direct signification: a cow, a train, an apple. Prior to that however, they are given toys that appeal to primary senses, principally sight and touch. The forms are invariably rounded, but broadly geometric, have affordances such as handles that ask to be touched and the colours are bright and highly saturated. Such toys often employ a formal vocabulary not dissimilar to abstract sculpture and perhaps for similar reasons.

The works in this series are all created from interchangeable units that are deployed in various combinations and presented like catalogue illustrations. Photographed so as to be free of any signifying context, they can be read as playfully, or as earnestly, as one pleases; as prototypes for toys that didn’t make the cut, or maquettes for monumental public sculptures that will never be built.

This series sits somewhere between the two Toys projects and the Cabinet of Curiosities. Essentially it is a response to the properties of the latex fabric, in particular its seductive transparency when backlit, coupled with an elasticity that allows it to be stretched, gathered and draped to create a range or allusive forms.

The works in TFHM continue to explore the seductive and fetishistic qualities inherent in “the photographic”, presenting a series of catalogue type illustrations of abstract objects constructed from latex fabric. The objects are put together from a set of basic forms: hoop, ball, cone and dome. The glossy black surface of the latex alludes to fetish-wear and sex toys, which also work with a very limited set of forms deployed in a range of time-honoured tropes. At the same time the forms are close to those of abstract sculpture within a biomorphic or semi-figurative tradition exemplified by the likes of Henry Moore.

The series was partly inspired by a Henry Moore exhibition which (as is almost always the case) conspicuously avoided reference to, or acknowledgment of, the erotic and sometimes downright kinky side of the artist’s output.

The works in CABINET OF CURIOSITIES are made up of multiple square photographs, arranged to suggest coherent three-dimensional objects. In fact, none of the individual photographs are actually contiguous with each other and instead are random close-ups of arbitrarily folded and pinned pieces of latex. The photographs are placed into arrangements based on finding ways to rotate, flip and align them to create the appearance of solid objects in real space. Thus, the objects presented are accurate photographs of things that don’t exist. Rather than digitally blend the images, slight misalignments, inconsistencies of focus etc are retained, inviting the eye of the viewer to do the blending instead. The series’ title refers to the historical collections of natural and ethnographic “curiosities” that were fashionable in the 17th to 19th centuries. Interestingly, objects that found their way into these collections were frequently faked by charlatans, who assembled imaginary specimens from parts of different objects; for example, skulls that amalgamated bones of different species.

Stelæ

A stele is, traditionally, a carved memorial tablet decorated with relief images or text. The images in this series allude to the appearance of traditional stelæ, but create them using a sheet of pinned and draped latex. Each image in the series overwrites the previous image. Traces of its predecessor remain, but each one presents a different state – a palimpsest. The series is a chain of overlapping resemblances; each image has its autonomy, whilst at the same time containing memories of previous states.

Whilst the proportions are those of memorials or gravestones they are also those of the human torso. This, combined with lustrous latex material and the process of pinning, draws on the language of fetishism, which is heightened by chiaroscuro lighting borrowed from commercial product photography.

The properties of materials and how they present themselves when photographed is often the starting point for a series. As the materials reveal their character, I attempt to draw out their properties; sometimes the work remains relatively abstract or formal, at others it becomes allusive and suggestive. Latex fabric has provided me with a number of avenues to explore and seems possessed of endless possibilities – in this instance the ghost-like, or x-ray character of a translucent variant generated a more ethereal and less overtly suggestive imagery than my other work with the material.

Watching a documentary about the Roman Baroque I was struck by the filming of certain small sculptures; slow, circling camera movements and lush chiaroscuro combined to create an aura of preciousness and reverence. These short video pieces take the same approach, but apply it to abstract objects made of draped and pinned latex, borrowing the language usually reserved for objects of high value or prestige.

The videos are all between one and two minutes long, but can be looped indefinitely.

Related to the “Month of Lunch” series, these works continue to play with the formal possibilities found in simple paper bags. In this instance the purity of their whiteness and the tall proportions put me in mind of certain iconic dresses by one of my heroes, that most sculptural of couturiers, Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Every day I get my lunch from the same café and it always comes in a small brown paper bag. These humble bags proliferated in my studio and it was when gathering them to put them into the recycling that I was struck by their marvellous formal qualities. I photographed a couple of them and quickly realised that near endless permutations of form could be found simply by folding or arranging them in different ways.

Like Works on Paper and Thread, Scarf is concerned with the phenomenology of photography and how it overlaps with drawing. The photographs are of a chiffon scarf pinned flat to the front of a soft-box and photographed with strong backlighting that burns out the background leaving it white. The images are simultaneously faithful and ‘realistic’ photographs of the scarf, (including moiré effects that the camera struggles to cope with), and drawings which create a fiction by employing a crude and approximate perspectival projection. The act of viewing is thus an active choice of how to construe the visual information presented, selecting between two systems that are incompatible and thus drawing attention to the artificiality of both.

INTERFERENCE consists of composite photographs of sheets of perforated metal. When laid on top of each other the holes in the metal sheets create interference patterns or moire effects and the resulting images are optically unstable, particularly when seen as large scale prints.

WORKS ON PAPER is a series of composite photographs of folded sheets of paper. The sheets are carefully folded and then photographed square on under raking light.

THREAD consists of photographs of lengths of gold thread stretched across a single flat plane and photographed under subdued lighting. The images take on the characteristics of line drawings and create illusions of depth by using systems such as perspective and isometric projection.

FOLDS focusses on the walls of the ubiquitous, cheaply built industrial units found on the fringes of towns and cities across Europe. The blank, corrugated metal surfaces offer morbid echoes of the purist forms of high modernist painting and architecture.