Wednesday, 19 February 2025

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




Sunday, 2 February 2025

NEW ENQUIRIES DAILY 2025

In order of composition, newest at the top. 

Photographs from Ashurst, New Forest unless indicated otherwise.

















Is discontinuity

the curse of life,

 or just what keeps it

interesting?


 

Why are these tulips so sad?

Is it because they are wilting?

Or are they only wilting

because they were discarded?

 

(Connaught Village, London)


 

Notice how

this ‘no dumping’ sign

demonstrates by way of warning

the very behaviour it seeks to prevent.

 

(Paddington, London)

 

How should I take this?

That all will be restful under the sky

or that I won’t have a roof

while the celestials do their thing?

 

(Premier Inn, Edgware Road, London)

 

What is the word

for a gap in the crack?

 

How have you been, yellow pipe

stuck here with no blue to flow into?

 

 







Vertical trees

have had their time,

and they’ve been good

but this is the horizontal wood.

(Cambridge Heath, London)



 


These are the night railings

keeping by force

to their rainy day order,

but doubling up with shadow.

 

(Islington, London) 

 

These are blank times

by day and by night.

No wonder the faceless

are modelled in the shops.

(Mayfair, London: as of 2025, the faceless mannequin is very much in fashion) 



What sort of driver do they want?

dodgy parking dawdler,

demon paced dasher

or a dream parcel deliverer?


(Holborne, London)


 

To steer himself clear

he makes up a rule:

the blacker the blonde,

the smaller the ratio of ‘Hi!’ to ‘Fuck off!’.

 

 

 

Whoever thought that Valentines

was such a serious matter?

Is he pondering whether the message is right,

or wondering who it would suit?


(Train from London to Winchester, 13 Feb 2025) 


What kind of reception

is all that graffiti?

Yet it could be worse:

nothing here is legibly offensive.

 

(Millbrook, Southampton)

 

Not just any pothole

but our pothole, outside our house.

The affection that generates

is, however, limited.

 

If paving slabs are kept in place

by treasury tags

then the budget for street repairs

Is even more stretched than I’d thought.

 

If catkins

are the best that’s available

it might be best

not to walk home.

 

Some slippage

is inevitable 

when comparing the ideal

to the reality.

 

If I worked here

I'd be tempted to make an ill-tempered resignation

simply to be able to shout:

‘Fuck ING!’ 

(ING Bank, City of London)



If they’re going to be invisible

you’ll need your clothes as permanent

as the skin you'll see through them -

for how would you know when to throw them away?

 

(Fitzrovia, London)


 


The view through ‘View’

is rarely worth the framing:

I had to wait five minutes

just for a walker and dog.  

 

(Naomi Blake: ‘View’, 1977, in the gardens of Fitzroy Square, Fitzrovia, London)




Is whatever’s not allowed and when

under water far enough

to claim you were floating

clear of the rules? 


(Kings Cross, London)




This is an important cone 

crowned and cloaked

with its own praetorian guard,

and also an assistant. 


(Fitzrovia, London)

 

 


Grass: green

Tub: greener.

Water: greenest

of them all?

 




Execution would be too harsh

as a punishment for fly posting -

yet, were that applied for this offence,

I could at least appreciate the irony.

 

(Brussels)




Could all of this burst

like a bubble,

not just the fleeting excitement,

but the longest-standing stone?

 

(Cathedral square, Ghent)

 


The city of Ghent

seems very relaxed:

even the plants

get a chance to sit down.

 

(Ghent)

 


The tricky question

of whether to take the plunge.

‘Is the water too cold? Am I sure I can swim?’

before you realise, ‘Fuck it, I’m a duck!’

 

(Ghent)


 


If I were a tree

I wouldn't choose to be Belgian:

and, if I were Belgian,

I wouldn’t choose to be a tree.

 

(Brussels)



 

Late January

and it’s still Christmas in Brussels -

on account, I assume,

of the seasonal role of its sprouts.

 

(Brussels, 26 Jan 2025)

 


 

Do pigeons normally

hunt in threes?

Only if they come across

an exceptionally elusive chunk of bread.

 

(Bethnal Green, London)

 


Given that they can’t quite claim

to be parked between them,

what’s the punishment for these tins

violating double yellow lines?

 

(Bethnal Green, London)

 


 

These branches seem

to have kept themselves together OK,

but how far can the deconstruction go

before they stop being a tree?

 

(Cambridge Heath, London)

 

 


What is all this

pseudo-comic crap?

Wouldn’t it be quicker

to set out what you can flush down the loo?

 

(South Western Trains, Weymouth to Waterloo)



 

Is this an abstraction?

Not if you’re engaged

in the decidedly figurative matter

of trying to climb it.

 

(Parthian rock climbing gym, Southampton – my grandchildren are regulars)

 


Is this a campaign

for alcohol-free communions

or just a chance for an actress / model

to show some playful spirit?


(London underground  stations. Lucky Saint is a beer with just 0.5% alcohol. The adverts, timed to coincide with ‘dry January' 2025. feature photographs by Rankin. The agency involved explains that ‘the Lucky Saint name and brand world leans in to beer's brewing history that began in monasteries with monks hundreds of years ago, and this is where we’ve taken our tone of voice from as well.’) 



I'm not one 

for speciesist assumptions: 

here's a pigeon headed for 

the reader registration desk.


(British Library, London)



This looks useful

in being for more than the usual bikes:

seems any old thing

can be attached here for disposal.

 

(Clerkenwell)



 

3 a.m. …

Probably the optimum time

to suffer an emergency,

given the absence of traffic.

 

(Police car, Kings Cross, London)




What happens in Dulwich

stays in Dulwich, as the saying goes…

So I threw this twist of green into the station bin

after it had seen me round the village.

 

(Dulwich, London)



 

One of these flowers

makes extra sense:

could any bee resist

the lure of a backlit bloom?

 

(St James's, London)

 


He knew he had to mind the gap –

who hasn't heard that?

Some gap in the mind

must be what he fell down.

 

(Waterloo Station, London)

 

 


This is a reasonably popular model

among those who feel

that you don’t want a fence

to cut off the view.




You might not expect much heat

to be radiated

from a homeless unit on the street,

but at least this has a pipe.

 

(Somers Town, London)


 


‘Water meets beer’?

In fact, it’s all in the natural family:

water meets the ‘citrus blast’

of ‘Mountain Dew’.

 

(Fitzrovia, London)



Buildings made of stone? 

I guess it's an option

if you run out of bricks

or mud or straw.

 

(Holborn, London: Stone Buildings were constructed from 1774-80 as the first step in an ultimately unrealised plan to rebuild Lincoln's Inn entirely in stone)

 




About Me

My photo
Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom
I was in my leisure time Editor at Large of Art World magazine (which ran 2007-09) and now write freelance for such as Art Monthly, Frieze, Photomonitor, Elephant and Border Crossings. I have curated 20 shows during 2013-17 with more on the way. Going back a bit my main writing background is poetry. My day job is public sector financial management.

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