LSAD Year 2 2013-2015 Catherina Ryan: Thursday Oct 4th

Conceptual

Road signs and stencil art

I've moved on again. Last week I was looking at how my sense of space was very transient. I'm always on the road, going from Tipperary to Limerick to Galway. I started looking at roadsigns. The roadsigns represent the transient journey-all the bends and turns that I make every day.
I went back to where the journey begins every week, Turraheen in Tipperary. I went to the river beside my house and started making sculptures in the river using the stones in the river. I made sculptures of the roadsigns. I went back every few hours and recorded the changes that the environment thad made.

I spoke to Patricia and she recommended looking at the actual roadsigns. I got a neighbour to get me some actual roadsigns from the county council. At the same time a studio buddy had started doing some stencil art. I started thinking about how I could incorporate some stencil art into the brief and this concept.

I was taling about my project brief with my housemate. She asked me what word came into my head immediately when I thought of ' My Sense of Space '. I straight away said 'kitchen'.

The kitchen represents my permanent, fixed, stable sense of space. Growing up I was always in the kitchen cooking and baking. I come from a large family and I was always too allergic to everything to do any farm work so I spent a lot of my time in the kitchen.

I made some simple stencils of some common kitchen utensils- spoon, tea cup, rolling pin.

stencils made out of card

I

I had to do quite a bit of experimenting to find the right material for the stencils. I tried card, acetate and strong tracing paper. Tracing paper worked out the best. There was a lot less paint bleeding outside the image. I started putting the stencils onto the previous images I had taken of the journey-stone walls, puddles, tarmac road etc.

Conceptual: Stencil art of kitchen utencils ( permanent metaphor ) onto images of the roadside ( transient metaphor)

I’ve moved onto actually making art on the road signs that I pass on my journey. My concept being that my sense of space is constantly on the move. I travel every week from Tipperary to Limerick to Galway. I’m always moving.

The constant on this often bi-weekly journey are the road signs that I pass along the way. They represent all of the bends and turns that I make on the journey. My sense of space has become so transient. This is in contrast to how my sense of space would have been growing up.

My friend asked me to sum up in one word what my salient image of my sense of space would have been growing up- what pops into my mind immediately when I think of ‘ My Sense of Space’. I answered straight away with the word ‘kitchen’ The kitchen represents my sense of space in a stable permanent sense. I grew up on a farm being the only girl with 5 brothers. I was allergic to hay, grass and animal hair so I was always in the house and especially in the kitchen cooking and baking.

So what I want to do now is to combine that stable sense of space with the more transient sense of space that plays a big part of my life now.

So I’ve made some stencils of kitchen utensils and sprayed them onto road signs on my journey.

I also got loads of road signs from a neighbour who works in the county council. I’m going to bring these road signs into the kitchen and place them in random places-at the kitchen table, behind the couch etc.

Another idea would be to bring the kitchen onto the road, onto the journey. To have actual cups, spoons, kitchen chairs strewn by the roadside or to have representations of parts of the kitchen on the journey, representations in resin, plaster, clay etc.

I showed these to Kieran and Sarah. They said to try it on the actual roadsigns but it's very literal.

Contextual:
Matisse did a lot of stencil art & paper cut outs in his final years because he became very immobile.
The following are 2 examples from his work that I drew inspiration from

Contextual: Banksy

Banksy's main body of work is in stencil art. Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.

His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world