Description of my piece:
My piece is a very experimental response to Roberta Le Poidevin’s Portlet Wall. It is a piece of wallpaper just under 50 inches in size that I first scrunched up to create a rough texture. I then rubbed pebbles covered in ink over this texture with the blue and green ink to create an abstract background. The black print over the top is a repeated print with a Lino cut I created, using a brick from Poidevin’s quilt as a reference. In my response to Portlet Wall, I wanted to make my own version of a wall as well as using similar colours to Poidevin to make the link even more clear. As this work is heavily themed around nature and of course the wall itself, I made the decision to make it on wallpaper as if it was made to be used as such. The piece was very much outside of my comfort zone but I was very excited about getting experimental with things that I could find outdoors, as my work does usually involve bringing the outside in and always revolves around nature. Poidevin’s Portlet Wall is such a lovely quilt and I am glad that I chose this one to respond to as part of my practice.
A reflection on the journey:
The process of getting to my final piece idea involved a lot of experimentation which ended up forcing me out of my comfort zone a lot of the time. I am very thankful for this though as I have had so much fun trying to work out what I wanted to create. In the beginning I thought I would only be creating a small and simple Lino cut print that somehow resembled the wall in Roberta Le Poidevin’s Portlet Wall whilst using colours that are visible in that quilt. Later on I decided that I wanted it to be much bigger, so I started using my previous Lino print on larger paper. I tried to experiment more as the print alone looked very bland, so I decided to rub pebbles covered in ink over scrunched up paper and I really loved this effect. I decided to do a new Lino cut after this to print over the new pattern I had created and that’s how I got my final idea. I decided to turn the pattern I had created into a sample of wallpaper as if I was selling a full roll, which I might make in the future if this project goes well.
