Been making some very slow progress with the missing sculpture plinth. Got another few layers of different colours of paint on and it’s looking a bit better. Still plenty of progress to be made but also just getting to grips with what works best in terms of colours and masking options. It’s definitely going to be a slow burner to be chipped away at when possible.
Got some quotes back for making the fictional gun foam insert. Some were surprisingly expensive but the more I looked the better it got. The other thing was that the price was significantly reduced when buying a few at a time. Looks like they’re going to be additions of 3 or 4 depending on the size.
We’ve been thinking more about the display of them and initially be thought they would be good in the Perspex boxes we’ve been making for others works. However, after discussing it a bit further we thought that an aluminium tray frame would be more consistent with the idea. It would also be powder coated to match the grey of a Peli case. We’ve also landed on a title for this series of works; every work will be The Division of Perspective and then in brackets there will be the name of the weapon or tool. Dividing perspective is a method of showing a 3 dimensional object in 2 dimensional space. This addition of a dimension is exactly what we’re attempting to do with these fictional objects; give them a life beyond the screen, another perspective.
There have been some open calls we’ve been finding and today we saw one for paper artworks to be exhibited at Manchester library and it made us think about a work we’ve had on the list for a while. It’s all to do with writing indentation clues in films; when people write a letter or a note, it's possible that the pressure of their pen or pencil will create indentations not just on the paper they're writing on, but on any paper that's underneath it, too. In some sorts of story (particularly Mystery Fiction, though not exclusively), making use of this fact is a well-established investigative technique. If you want to know what someone wrote on a notepad but the note is no longer there, just look at the next piece, possibly shading it with a pencil to bring out the contrast.
It’s the invisibility and discovery aspects that really interested us and it reminded us of blind embossing/debossing; a printing technique that doesn't use ink, where you stamp a mark of something into a material, leaving an indentation. We wanted to create a work where a small scrap of paper had something blind embossed onto it but wasn’t scribbled over like in films, it’s still invisible, still waiting to be discovered. After researching further into it, we found that it was mentioned by Sherlock Holmes when telling Watson how he got his information as "a fact that has dissolved many a happy marriage". However, in this case, he uses the blotting paper to obtain the reverse message, as the writer had used a pen. We then decided that we would both use the quote and blotting paper for the piece. In terms of display, the scrap is going to be shown in a white frame, and within a wonkily angled mount. The idea here was that we’re continually adding elements to the piece but since they’re all of the same colour they’re not actually enabling the note to be seen more directly. Usually a frame and a mount are used to point out the object within, but these ones don’t manage that. We’re going to call it You see, but you do not observe, which is another Sherlock Holmes quote.
