CONCEPT Urban Surface Commission Artist Nottingham

CHRIS PICKUP || ARTIST DESIGNER SCULPTOR

original artwork

Link to my Axis site

Portraiture

Concept

About the artist

Chris Pickup was born near London and graduated from Loughborough College of Art with a First Class Honors degree in Fine Art. He has exhibited his work in one man and group shows in London, The North East and The Midlands. Chris now lives in Nottingham and divides his time between freelance artwork, commissions and teaching.

Urban Surface Work

2011

Click Image above to view Urban Surface gallery.

The work is about reality; it explores how we perceive it, experience it, understand it and ignore it. The subject matter I choose are the surfaces we see every day of our waking lives: concrete, wood, metal, peeling paint; this reality we all experience but, on a minute by minute basis, choose to ignore. These surfaces are initially sourced through photography of real surfaces in real places. As the artist, when I find a surface I wish to photograph, I experience that surface as an utter reality. However, from the point at which the shutter clicks, to the point at which you the audience experience the work, that reality is manipulated as an illusion. I will sometimes collect a sample or artefact to try to bring you closer to the reality that I experienced, but to what extent does that fragment, isolated from its context, evoke a reality for you?

Each work represents a frozen moment, a freeze frame of our mundane experience. Initially this is done with the camera. But to freeze a reality an illusion has to be created, in this case a photograph, which is subject to manipulation. To enhance the sense of reality a three dimensional work is created from the photographic material, through clay modelling, casting and paint effects, but this process manipulates the illusion further and increasingly detaches it from reality. Its site specific nature may be enhanced by making presentations of samples or artefacts collected from the real sites. These items have undeniable reality but are out of context, like shards of pottery in an archaeological museum. They are touchstones of reality but cannot recreate it.

The completed wall mounted bas relief works hang in a netherworld between painting and sculpture. Although the surface is highly sculptural their visual power is almost entirely dominated by the use of paint; this paint being sprayed, applied by brush and as a pre dried laminate. Their visual presence suggests the portrayal of reality yet through the manipulation of the motifs of wood, metal, concrete and paint and the application of a firm geometrical composition, the approach to their creation is more akin to that of abstraction.

With or without the accompaniment of displayed found material, the exhibition viewer is invited into a space where the constant flow of reality is suspended and yet tiny excerpts of it are represented. Your experience of reality is made more intense through the medium of illusion. In an age where reality is televisual or virtual, how much of your reality reaches you through the medium of illusion and do you know where the boundaries are?

Urban Surface Exhibition Proposal

I am proposing an exhibition which aims to present the fleeting moments of real experience frozen as a snapshot so that the viewer can wander around within the paused moment and contemplate and question how they experience reality. I would employ wall mounted work in the form of surface studies with an option to augment the show with display cabinets and light columns for found objects. In addition I am developing a technique of direct casting where areas of a floor surface could be reproduced and incorporated within waist high plinths allowing the viewer to walk amongst images which would normally be below their feet. In essence I have formulated the working concept of a ‘Museum of the Unremarkable’ where the ignored and mundane is represented for contemplation; where reality is experienced intensely through the medium of illusion.

I envisage my contribution to an exhibition programme comprising work that I have created over a period of time and from more than one site and would be more than happy to exhibit purely wall mounted surface studies. However, clearly the work has potential to be commissioned as a site specific piece. I would very much enjoy the opportunity to work in this way and feel that surface casting and collection and display of artefacts are more immediate and therefore the most practicable; the large surface studies can be time consuming pieces to produce. I would be happy to discuss with curators possible responses in the context of any available funding and time constraints.

C. Pickup

June 2011

Site Responsive Work

Conceptual Statement October 2007

Over the past few years my work has become increasingly site responsive. Initially this response was to the physical and visual presence of the site. This culminated in my collaboration, Urban Journeys, with Mike Bowdidge at the Red Gallery in Hull. In this work three study sites were chosen arbitrarily, merely sampling the streets of Hull. Mike produced assemblage from what he found at the site and I photographed surfaces and collected discarded items. My aim was to create a ‘museum exhibition’ of my findings by reproducing surfaces as large wall mounted works, displaying finds in lit cases and speculating as to the provenance of the found objects and where appropriate suggesting narratives that linked them. The final stage was to photograph the finds and present those images in an attempt to evoke an iconic status for them.

My next project, INMATES, was an Arts Council England funded installation at the Northern General Hospital, Sheffield. This hospital was originally a workhouse and my brief was to explore the history of the site. I came expecting to use the protocols that I had established in Hull yet found the site historically bare from a visual perspective. This led me into creating the work from historical research and archival material, even involving an act of archaeology and contacting surviving relatives of workhouse inmates. Through the funding for INMATES I secured the mentorship of John Newling. He helped me understand that the key to site responsive work is to have protocols of investigation so as to hear the ‘voice’ of a site rather than coming to it with a ‘what I do is’ attitude. He has clarified for me how I can adopt an anthropological approach with the artist operating as participant/observer. Within this there is the need to ‘map’ a project. One needs to understand a site’s context both nationally and locally and understand the effect this will have on how an audience perceives that site. There is often an interesting tension between the tacit understanding a viewer may have of a site and the reality revealed by research. My task as a site responsive artist is to fuse anecdotal research into a visual statement. I have always admired a museum display’s ability to do this and would wish to develop the use of text and images, and where appropriate publication, to communicate results of the research on a site as well as to explain the conceptual and visual statements I would make about that site.

The historical theme continues with my most recent project Imagine a City… commissioned by Mantle Arts. Here I investigated Leicester market as being the core of the city in more ways than a geographical one. Through a display case of collected materials the work explores the commerce that triggered the city’s creation and now demonstrates the pan global nature of that commerce in the 21st century. More indirectly the work alludes to how the nature of modern commerce both creates and services our ethnically rich cities

The continuity between these two projects is the ‘museum ethic’. I feel that using a museum format to present information about a site, and to articulate the conceptual content of the artistic statements which accompany it, allow the work to read more easily. This has the potential to widen the audience for such projects. My integration of fact, interpretation and explanation is the unusual approach that I bring to the debate on the nature of site responsive work.

Click here to view Imagine a City...

Click here to view the INMATES exhibition.

Click here to view Urban Journeys.

Chris Pickup

October 2007

Urban Surface

Conceptual Statement March 2006

Urban Surface is a line of investigation based on the visual experience of living in a city. It seeks to record the pattern, colour and texture which are created as humanity constructs, repairs and abandons the surfaces of a city. It will respond to how the steel of the modern age will abut with the crumbling stonework of the city’s past or the juxtaposition of conscious architectural or sculptural statements against a random back drop of jumbled buildings. Urban Surface can chart the passage of time and respond to the urban experience of the modern city, from direct observation, with a combination of painting and digital photography. Digital photographs are enhanced, edited and reassembled to produce finished imagery in its own right or as the starting point for painting and mixed media work.

A bas relief and heavily textured surface is prepared to which colour is applied by masking and spraying a combination of oil and water based paint. This creates a surface of great complexity. Then traditional painting techniques are used to enhance and develop the surface and add any imagery that is required. In some cases found objects are incorporated into the final piece or even displayed in display boxes, in their own right. The final result is work which is textured, complex and colour rich yet reflects its very humble starting point.

Urban Surface as Site Specific Work

Urban Surface has enormous potential as a site specific piece. The visual material for the exhibition could be gathered photographically from the building itself, within a few hundred square metres of the front door, or from the wider environment. It would require the work to be focused on paving, road and wall surfaces and roof tops. Visitors to the exhibition would enter unaware of the source material until encountering the commission piece. They would continue with their day, their senses awakened to the complexity of the surfaces around them as they move through the building and step out on to the street.

To see examples of Urban Surface work and explore it's Site Specific quality click the images below.

Urban Journeys Red Galley Hull Geldards LLP Urban Surface Commission

Chronological Marks

The patterns which appear in The Chronological Marks series are drawn from various sources: ethnic, scientific, technological, and it is the consistency in this pattern that is of interest. The appearance of road schemes begin to echo the computer motherboard which in turn echoes ancient Bronze Age rock carving; the earliest decorative marks and the beginnings of writing are part of a continuum, which reaches today with bar-codes and the patterns created by circuitry. Some of the later work juxtaposes iconic human forms and text with these patterns. This work responds to the relationship between the conscious visual statements we make as our civilization develops and the subconscious patterns created as a by-product.

2007

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