A Throw Of The Dice...
I felt I needed to write this down for my own sanity as it's the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night. So I thought I'd share it with anyone else that might find it of use if they can't sleep.
I was sat at a desk, invigilating my first solo show in Cornwall, studying the new work I had produced since I arrived four months earlier. The work had become more three dimensional as I had anticipated but I wasn't happy with the kind of bricolage approach I had adopted. I was very taken with the idea of producing something like the Margaret Mellis piece I’d seen in Tate St. Ives but I didn't want to spend much of my time gathering detritus from the seashore or streets to create that sort of assemblage. I had to think of an alternative. I needed to focus on something specific.
My first five years as a visual artist had evolved from photographs of derelict walls to text based acrylics on canvas, mixed-media works incorporating wall filler, rusted tin, gold leaf, even vintage wallpaper on a breeze block, to hard edged geometric acrylic works on cradled wood panels. My palette had taken influence from the industrial locations of my photography and the paint had started to cover the edges of the deep panels. That's when I thought I could take the three-dimensional aspect further and, ideally, on a larger scale. Eventually.
While passing the 10 days invigilating I read several books and the Stéphen Mallarmé poem 'A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance' popped up. This phrase had resonated with me before being, someone that didn't plan any works in advance and welcomed the element of chance. But this time it was the shape of the dice rather than its numbered sides that got me thinking. If I wanted to make three dimensional works maybe I should take a three dimensional object, reduce it to two dimensions and restructure it into a different shape. It would have flat faces, so could still be construed as a painting but they wouldn't all necessarily sit against the wall. They could even, in fact, be free-standing sculptural items. I would eventually, after four months of experimentation, realise that an element of chance or randomness could also come into play. More on that later.
Thinking about the cube made me realise that it could represent many of the themes my previous works alluded to. In box form it could represent the walls I had photographed. The walls that suggest the home, personal space or confinement. Deconstructed and in two dimensions it could stand in for the borders and territories that my grid like geometric abstracts represented. Configured together they start to represent floor plans [homes again] or labyrinths.
A quick bit of research informed me that there were eleven different ways to deconstruct a cube. Ten of which can fill a 3 x 4 space but the eleventh, annoyingly, is 5 x 2. This one would only be used in combination with any of the others, if at all.
I'm very much a live without a map sort of person but maybe the two years planning and execution involved in relocating to Cornwall made me wonder what I might achieve artistically with a bit of a plan! So I sat down to set myself some parameters [I prefer these to rules!] around the cube theme. I started a new Instagram account, @stevewildestudio, a dedicated page on my website and start to create works in series of 10 and document them here as I released them, working from the flattened out cubes, separate them, combine them, layer those combinations and eventually lead myself up to the three dimensional works.
It was the layering of the eleven shapes in different configurations that re-introduced the element of chance. In fact there were so many ideas brewing as I planned things out the abundance of ideas became a bit overwhelming. So much so that I started to dismiss some and start immediately on others to exhaust them as quickly as possible.
Once I had made four of these pieces I was surprised how similar they were so chance started to be interfered with and I started erasing some areas or moving parts of the composition around.
More on this process and my journey to follow as I also work on integrating my Instagram and Substack