2021
Aerosol and hand-cut vinyl on aluminium composite
40 x 61cm
In “Jade goes for a run” I wanted to capture a moment in time down a suburban back-street, full of sounds, visual voices, textures and movement. A voice calls out to a dog “JaDe” as she rushes down the street, the dog clearly doesn’t want to stop. Street signs tell us where we are and warn drivers it’s a dead-end road. While other signs are obscured from our view; only for the eyes of the drivers going in the other direction. Graffiti in this street either screams to be noticed – filling the wall with an individual’s signature style, or the kind of graffiti that wants to let you know ‘that person was here’. I always love how people find a free spot on the wall then fill that empty space with their calling-card.
This is clearly an urban environment with various textures of brick walls, pavement and gutter; there’s no greenery here. In this landscape I wanted to convey both the colour and textural interpretation of the surfaces – a coarse brick wall full of small, jagged edges and a sandpaper like finish. The rough gravel dry surface of the pavement. Each surface consists of up to 4-5 layers of patterns each pattern communicates a certain aspect of the texture of that surface. A brick wall to me is made up of largish sharp random squares and rectangles, then smaller triangles and pointy lines, then even smaller circles that indicate the flecks of gravel contained in each brick. The pavement has similar large sharp random squares and rectangles, but then it has a wavey texture from the ground being smoothed down by the machinery, then spots of gravel throughout.
The poles holding the signs aren’t important to me they are just vehicles for the signs, so I’ve turned them into keylines so that the signs shine through, even if it is just the back of the signs.
BTW: Jade is actually the name of one of our dogs but she’s a Jack Russell terrier mix.