UPCYCLE

 

UPCYCLE: from packaging to art

In ‘Upcycle’ eight artists look at packaging, demonstrating how something so mundane can become elevated – artistically upcycled, if you like. Cue implications for recycling, consumerism, sustainability and other existential matters, as well as plenty of wit.

How does such a quotidian source relate to artistic epiphany? Gavin Turk presents used lighters à la Hirst; Leo Fitzmaurice maxes out the crushed Cola can and proposes that we see supermarket bags as paintings; Sarah Pettitt’s tenderly provisional constructions have an unassertive presence consistent with much of her material coming from left-overs; and Shane Bradford employs the surprisingly elaborate components of crates used for home deliveries to print paintings titled with the faintly absurd claims of supermarket taglines.

Another question to ask is: are we seeing packing repurposed, or something else pretending to be packaging? Thus, Marisa Culatto turns paper tape from packing aid to art material, while Susan Collis’s work seems to be what it should have been wrapped in; and Sam Hodge prints directly from unfolded cardboard boxes to arrive at surprising suggestions, whereas Russell Herron makes cardboard portraits which, in a double-take contrast, involve no cardboard.

UPCYCLE runs 19 Feb – 1 March at GPS Gallery, 36 Great Pulteney Street, Soho - curated by Paul Carey-Kent, and featuring Gavin Turk, Leo Fitzmaurice, Marisa Culatto, Russell Herron, Sam Hodge, Sarah Pettitt, Shane Bradford and Susan Collis

 

Gavin Turk often uses the ‘signature works’ of famous artists to create hybrids that, in his words, ‘question the notion of ideas as individual, of the ownership of ideas, of intellectual property, and of authorship’. He is also interested in the elevation of mundane, discarded and overlooked objects to the status of ‘fine art’, explaining that ‘there is a provocation around value in presenting people with something they instinctively think has little or no value, and in inviting them to look again to find meaning, importance, and relevance’. His binbags, which invite such a revaluation by proving to be cast in bronze, are sufficiently well-known that the viewer is likely to think of them when encountering his display of used lighters. Yet those are the actual items. This time the elevation lies in the presentation and the associations, not in the material – and Turk may be teasing his own oeuvre as well as those of Damien Hirst, Donald Judd and Giorgio Morandi.

 

Leo Fitzmaurice admires how advertising attracts the attention of potential consumers, but then proceeds to disarm its function and put that energy to a new use as art. Here, for example, simple interventions enable plastic bags to be presented as abstract paintings. The bags are, Fitzmaurice says, ‘a form in which the brand or logo moves through the urban environment – most resembling, historically speaking, flags or banners’ but these pieces ‘silence objects that are intended to shout’. Similarly, Pepsi or Cola cans emerge in new guises: fully street-trodden examples imitate the phases of the moon – perhaps they act as a lunar clock; while more partially-distorted cans are anthropomorphised as suffering in a vice, even as they also pose as books from a nightmare library in which advertising will be all we can read.

 

Marisa Culatto‘s 45-strong ‘Opallid’ series came out of a desire to reduce the amount of plastic used to transport her works, by employing paper rather than plastic packing tape. At the time, she was shifting her primarily lens-based practise to one more exploratory of materiality. It was no surprise, then, that Culatto became interested in the tape as a textural element.  Its qualities are exploited by white paper packing tape and ink on paper works that arrive – in her words – at ‘an almost intentional collaboration with the support and the behaviour of the pigments as they interact’. The series builds to an immersive chromatic materiality as ‘opal’ and ‘pallid’ colours come together, as indicated in the portmanteau term used for individual work titles, such as ‘Opallid Pink Yellow’, the first colour in each pair having most quantity.

 

Russell Herron makes good use of the cardboard packaging that arrives in his house: it has formed the basis for hundreds of ‘Cardboard Portraits’: he punches a face into the card, reducing it down to its most essential features. They’re more like anti—portraits than conventional likenesses - even as they remind him of his ‘vast mental catalogue’ of faces and emotions. The cardboard goes into the recycling bin – but not before Herron has completed a paradoxically meticulous graphite rendering of his near-instant action. They are, in a way, trompe-l'œil renditions of a far-from trompe-l'œil original. Did that initial attack on the cardboard upcycle it into art? Perhaps not, but drawing it certainly does. And, in a recent move, it does so with added colour.

 

Sam Hodge makes her ‘Unfolded Packaging’ works by printing directly from unfolded packing from her recycle bin, using ink made with earths gathered on her walks around the British coast, so contrasting ephemeral with geological.  She rolls the ink onto the unfolded boxes and transfers their impression onto damp paper, repeating the process several times to build up complex, layered shapes. The results are appealing as an abstract constructivist language, but also reminiscent of palimpsestic plans of ancient cities, robotic constructions, totemic figures, masks... Thus, something unexpected emerges from the debris of our unbridled consumption – reminding us, perhaps, that at the global level the ‘something unexpected’ to emerge from that is global warming. Her titles come from the often ludicrous claims on the packaging.

 

Sarah Pettitt’s tenderly provisional constructions use colour to elevate and unify the parts – Pettitt’s current preference is for blue. Their unassertive presence is consistent with most materials being found or coming from left-overs, suggesting personal history. Pettitt is aiming at an object with its own logic – that ‘contains itself’ in a way that provides a starting point for viewers. Yet one can also look to art history. Take the triangle of thread hung from a nail, and given shape by a found plastic tube that frames a chunk of polystyrene: Pettitt says her nails derive from crucifixions and the use of thread from Fred Sandback – and that polystyrene rather resembles an Yves Klein-blue sponge. Elsewhere, a striped plastic bag takes on something of Daniel Buren.

 

 

Shane Bradford frequently finds that the supermarket crates used for home deliveries of food – though they’re meant to be reused – are dumped near his studio. They have, he notes, handles and surprisingly elaborate patterns, and each supermarket uses a slightly different design. Bradford separated them into their flat components and printed from them, using just one box at a time, titling them by the faintly absurd claims of the store’s taglines, such as ‘All Together Better’ or ‘Your Happiness Guaranteed’. We could take the series, like Sam Hodge’s, as a comment on consumerism, but Bradford doesn’t intend to foreground that. ‘What really interests me’, he says, ‘is the hidden visual lexicon of objects and what that might reveal about our relationship to new tech and globalised culture’.

 

Susan Collis often draws us into deception: for example, accidental paint splashes turn out to be artworks made from mother of pearl. Just so, it seems here that her contributions – paintings, by the looks of it – have arrived, but have not yet been unwrapped. In fact, these are the works as seen: they are drawings of paintings wrapped in a protective blanket for transport.  That playful illusion is enjoyable, but the main point is to enquire into the mechanisms of value: what seems accidental, contingent or worthless proves to be deliberate and expensive to produce, whether in materials or labour.  In the context of this show, moreover, you might say that Collis is downcycling art into packaging – only for it to be upcycled into art again!

Gallery guide - see floor numbers