artists from searching layering

Mark Khaisman 

he layers tape to create a scene from a movie 

 

FORENSIC EVIDENCE

wood sculpture

The material for this wood sculpture came free from a scaffolders who were discarding it. I used scaffolding boards which are used for temporary staging and floors built up on the sides of buildings as they seem appropriate to the layers of an archaeological site. There was about 3 tons of wood and, with some help from friends, we broke and splintered the edges of the boards, cut them and fixed them in stacks. This recycled sculpture was first shown at London's Serpentine gallery. The piece takes as its starting point the Sutton Hoo Burial ship which survived only as an impression in the sandy soil above the River Deben on a high escarpment in Suffolk. It had been dragged up a steep hill and buried beneath a tumulus and was about 27 metres long. It was already an old well used boat which had been given a new function to transport an Anglo Saxon king on his liminal journey beyond death. The incredible grave goods that were discovered in the ships hull were all that remains from this find and are in the British Museum. But for me even more wonderful than these objects was the negative impression of the ship itself, and that somehow it was more powerful in its absence. It has been the source of many years work and a series of artworks all of which resulted from a chance visit to the National Maritime Museum.

Materials: Recycled scaffolding boards.

Dimensions: 75 x 240 x 980 cm

A LONG WAY FROM THE BATHROOM

art installation

This recycled artwork was first commissioned by Bonington Gallery, Nottingham. There are four works in the Bathroom series and this is the second. The series begins with Barbara Cartland and Mills & Boon paperbacks and, by continuing and developing the layering process goes through several stages to arrive at a semi-translucent material in the final fourth part. The title is taken from a phrase found on the first page of one of the books I used to construct the piece. Beneath our too rationalised and civilised western world lie most of the things I am interested in - things such as archaeology, crop marks, iron age hill forts, long barrows. Also lost and buried watercourses, cisterns, and forgotten rivers. The piles of recycled paperbacks were piled up into stacks and the centre was hollowed out and carved into a saucer-like spherical negative shape.

"Piles of pulp novels, a sea of titles such as Love Has Two Faces, The Burning Quest, Nurse Errant, and A Highland Conquest, are stacked 24 high and placed close together. A perfectly even, shallow saucer shape has been scoured out across and through the middle of this surface as if it were an open-cast mine. The detailed cover illustration gives way to a grey pool and layers of printed word become smeared and disappear..." - Sacha Craddock, The Times

COMMISSION: Bonington Gallery, Nottingham UK.

Materials: Paperback books.

Dimensions: 40 x 450 x 500 cm