The Waves exhibition at Five Walls Projects was also an installation artwork in its own right. The stretcher paintings in the show were all designed to fit together in the specific setting of their placement in Gallery 4.

Also independent works, each of the paintings carries a matrix of cotton tapes, suspended a few millimetres away from the canvas surface. These act as a support for various colours to reflect off the canvas, so in effect the perceived colour is applied by the action of rays of light.

The lines of reflective colour connected the paintings, continuing from one to the next so that they could also be taken to represent rays of refracted light bouncing around in the space of the gallery.

The installation explored ideas from a previous project, The Planes, in which the corresponding lines on opposite walls were parallel, which meant that lines of the same colour also described flat planes bisecting the space.

The Waves is a series of straight lines, but with a twist. Taking advantage of the fifth wall to reveal it, I allowed the angles of corresponding lines to vary. This meant that the planes in the space at Five Walls were no longer flat. Extending into the distance, and with some mental application, these twists could be imagined as part of larger ripples, or waves.

The process for creating this work began with taking detailed measurements of the gallery space and plotting them into Illustrator. The stretcher dimensions were then placed into the design and connecting lines drawn in. The resulting measurements were then transposed onto the canvases. The tapes, carrying the colours on their canvas-facing sides, were then stapled to the stretchers according to the schema, with polypropylene raisers holding them away from the surface, so that the colour would not be completely obscured by the tapes. This dialectic of revealing and obscuring can be seen as an example of what I refer to as concurrence.

PROJECT: The Waves, Five Walls Projects

View the Schema image for the design.