Two of the subjects Peter Lloyd has selected for our Exquisite Corpse papercut project, are ‘online dating’ and ‘sexting’. Now while my life at the easel is exciting and creatively exploratory on diverse subjects, in this game/project there’s the opportunity to be wayward, lively and explicit in ways that I am usually not, and it’s a lot of fun.
The worlds of online dating, chatrooms and sexting are rich pickings for the visual artist. I’ve always enjoyed the ‘big’ subjects, and here we have one of the biggest…sexual desire… fast evolving in tandem with the technologies to express it. The experiences can be enlivening and liberating.
However, alongside the fun and games, the new freedoms have also brought deception and abuse. The cyber-world opens many doors for us, and while peering through them can be stimulating and fun, there is a dark side too. But then I always like the great Hogarth’s work best when he turns his eyes from the polite salons, to the whorehouses, gambling-tables and alleyways where most of the interesting stuff goes on.
Right now Peter Lloyd and I are working out ideas and how to express them through the medium of the papercut. Our creations are separate. When we start to complete and splice them together into hybrid beasts, everything will start to look rather different.
Last year illustration graduate Johann Rohl came to Ty Isaf, and for a month we worked collaboratively on images, commissioned by Sarah Parvin for her forthcoming ‘Curious One’ website.
While that experience was immensely rewarding and undoubtedly prepared the way for the current project, it felt quite different. With this, there’s as yet no expectation of where the papercut ideas might go, giving us the freedom to be playful and a little cocky.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 