The Paper Place Statement

The Paper Place

"Art is primarily the record of an intellectual process rather than a visual experience"

Leonarda da Vinci

I'm writing this before I "make" the "art". I have chosen to exhibit a record of my thinking instead of a "piece of art". I have chosen to call this installation The Paper Place because of the vast amount of paper I seem to collect within my practice as an artist through my studio work,my community placement and philosophy. This piece is an ultimate collage of the year.

I toyed with the word studio other than place but that would insinuate oil painting and clay pots and then maybe I would have had to put newspaper on the floor. Instead this space is more like a kind of messy office. A hopeless attempt to "sort out" the random and abstract nature of creative thought. This thinking includes most of the paper I've been given,or have used or have made during this second year of my course. Paper is a tool:a tool for writing ideas on and remembering things,a way of capturing light and colour ,a surface fro reading,it is a site to be cut out and changed,it can become a template or a means to promoting an event.

This paper is an attempt to express my practice as an artist,or perhaps a writer,or a philosopher.

This paper place is not a room,it is not a fixed space it can be de-constructed and transported. Although this is a large amount of my paper I still have a paper place in my room at home and I have a small paper place in my bag too. We all have paper places, it may be the stack of of phone books ans letters you have piling up on the stairs or the books you carry around in your bag. Even whilst writing this I was interrupted and asked to fill out the paper pages of the census booklet...