I had moved house in late 2018 and needed to reestablish a work place. A work style for a much smaller office-sized room
to compare with a real studio space where space allowed for lighting rigs and back-drops.
And a work ethic, which got no easier as the pandemic gained a grip on our thoughts. We dutifully de-socialised,
caught up on local walking, and did lots of big jigsaw puzzles which stimulated me to collate the results of an open
call. I noted that later in 2020 the 70th anniversary of the first exhibition of Grant Wood's painting ‘American
Gothic’ would fall due. I used an image from a jigsaw puzzle of this for the cover artwork
of
American Gothic: a 90th year appreciation
The reduced access to real people served to ease my unhappiness arising in not making personal performance work and in continuing to use mannequin figures. Self-evidently the poses that these figures can hold will be wooden and the challenge is to explore the potential for some expression of empathy in any one image of two mannequin. Perhaps here. Too much of this work can seem simplistic, even trite.
in previous years...