Experiments with Old Car Parts in the Garden

I’m in the middle of a major change to my website, and when I’m doing anything like that I like to concentrate on one thing at a time, but its not that easy, life and the family get in the way, then there’s the work involved promoting the exhibition and my commitment to the 365 project on my Flickr site. That is every day in 2009 I have to take a photograph and upload it to Flickr. I find I’m not out and about as much as normal and so the photo opportunities are restricted.

In my garden I have several panels I have collected from the burnt out cars I photographed last year, I generally carry on photographing them for months after the car was torched, sometimes I will experiment with treatments to metal surfaces using anything from varying strengths of acid to a selection of liquids from light oil, water, and small solutions of acrylic paint (just enough to leave a stain on the surface).

For my Flickr 365 photo today (Number 43-365 no less) I took some photographs of a pile of bonnets with little success because I haven’t worked on them recently (it’s a bit cold outside) but this was a nice result.

I think I will post some more of my work on the blog similar to this image that is nice to look at without being great and also others that are great but could not be added to my portfolio because they don’t fit with my artist statement.

My photography aims to capture the disturbance to surfaces created by acts of joy riding and arson by zooming into scorched, disfigured vehicle parts that are occupied in the lifecycle of corrosion, the natural process that tries to reclaim human made objects to an elemental state more in line with the energy of the molecules the objects are made of.

Torching accelerates this journey of returning to the earth and I look to capture, investigate and at times distort results of the advancement of its lifecycle. Using results of the explosion; scorched metal, molten glass, fabrics, and plastics, the rust and the gallons of water from the firemen’s hose I strive to turn a negative blot on the landscape using technology, photography and oil paint to transform the textual image into a positive beautiful landscape.