Stripped Bare

This post is devoted to a series of work that I produced in 2001 and 2002 called Stripped Bare. I had been working with wire figures for a number of years (see this post), and decided to explore a 2-D version of these figures. In the beginning all the "dolls" were stuffed with hair, but I decided to exhibit some with just the wire. The shadows cast on the wall became part of the work, and this led to me thinking of doing photograms of them. The white figures on black are the photograms of the sculptures, and the black figures on white are the photograms of the photograms. I framed the two images from each work together for contrast.





Having obtained a "drawing" of the figures, I decided to work with photocopy "static" to get more texture in the images. I used 3rd, 4th or 5th generation photocopies and printed them on rag paper to simulate an intaglio print.





I also continued photocopying each image until it became a blob of ink. I pinned all the photocopies to the wall so that an original image slowly got darker and darker, then swapped to the next darkened image and went back in steps until I reached its original image.




I had also made a number of works with hair boxes so made photograms from variations of those.








I quite liked these red/pink variations but have never exhibited them.