Paul Edmunds
Sieve
I find it hard to separate my materials and processes. I don’t think of a certain process I would like to explore and then think about a material in which this can be realised – process and material arise simultaneously. Along with its obvious physical properties, paper is almost an honorary two-dimensional material. A way of exploring this lack of depth is by piercing it, creating a window. I have done this in three layers, each allowing only certain parts of the piece below to show through. I liken this to a filtering process, or perhaps the way in which certain phenomena, the sky for example, bend light in a certain way, causing them to appear a particular colour. I have long wanted to create a work which explores light by screening or filtering it.
The work began with a digital photograph of a dawn sky. In Photoshop I did a CMYK analysis of a section of the sky, noting how the composition of the pixels changed as the colour of the sky altered. From this I created a table which tracked these changes. My problem was then to find a way of illustrating this without creating a pixellated rendering of a sunrise. In a 3D drawing package I constructed a three-dimensional grid where each face of a repeated shape represented one of the process colours (actually only cyan, magenta and yellow in this case as there was no black present in the piece of sky I chose). I devised a system whereby a hexagon on each facet of the aforementioned shapes represented the percentage of the respective colour in a particular part of the sky. As this value changed so did the area of the hexagon (the changes were minute and I would never have been able to draft them by hand). This pattern was then printed out onto a series of A4 sheets, they were silkscreened with process colour and then I cut out the hexagons by hand (the hexagons are actually distorted because they were not drawn on the picture plane, but in three-dimensional space). The A4 sheets were then assembled into the final format and these large sheets were then hung one in front of the other.
The final work is not a depiction of a dawn sky as such. It is more an illustration of colour information gleaned from there which remains faithful to the rich sensual nature of that source.
My approach is quite odd I think. To me the prospect of cutting hexagons in paper for two or three months is not that daunting. Sometimes I think it’s quite safe territory and I should really try something else, but it always seems to come out this way. When it’s going well, the work gains its own kind of momentum and my concentration is not focused in a hard way. Occasionally it is boring, but not as often as you’d think. My working methods are probably ‘introspective’ or lend themselves to introspection, but that’s really more of a problem than a prerequisite. In fact, I’ve often ‘introspected’ about boredom and it tends to collapse in on itself. A lot of the time we wish we were doing something other than what we are doing, and maybe that’s just what boredom is. The rest of the time we wish that what we were doing wouldn’t end!
When I finish something major there’s always a feeling of relief as well as a little sadness at not having the task to perform anymore. People have described my working methods as obsessive but I don’t think that’s true. My work is usually done in quite a measured balanced way and it seldom throws the rest of my life out of balance.
Biography
Born in 1970 in Johannesburg, Edmunds has an MA Fine Art from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (1995) and lives in Cape Town. Solo exhibitions include Cloud (2003) and Houding (2001), both at João Ferreira Fine Art in Cape Town. Group exhibitions include HIV(E), a site-specific project in Durban and at the Franchise gallery in Johannesburg (2004); Silence/Violence in Durban and Nieu-Bethesda (2002); and Bodies II: Sublimation at the Klein Karoo Festival (2002). Edmunds is also an art critic and contributing editor to Artthrob.co.za.
Paul Edmunds is represented by the João Ferreira Gallery - see http://www.joaoferreiragallery.com/edmunds/index.html