Instant Places: Watermark

...for the colours diametrically opposed to each other...are those that reciprocally evoke other in the eye - Goethe, Theory of Colours

Laura and Ian work in the Mary Misner Print Studio for 10 days, creating a series of 60 monoprints in which they juxtapose area of colour to create harmonies of difference, as overlaid colours hover around the diametric oppositions of the colour wheel. They open their working processes to the public by displaying the work in progress as a flow installation, mounting an evolving record of the print process on the windows for viewing by passers-by on Melville Street.

Laura and Ian also photograph the stages of work, and use these images as source material for a generative visual machine they program in the software environment Max/MSP/Jitter. They complete the project with an audiovisual performance in which they use modular synthesis and prepared guitar to spontaneously compose an audio field that evolves in parallel with a visual world being generated in real time, as images from the monoprint process permute and morph in infinitely-varying transformations.

The project stems from an event Laura and Ian encountered by chance during their introductory visit to Cambridge in late May 2019. As they explored the river paths along the Grand River they happened on a sale of art supplies that had been acquired and used over many years by Cambridge artist Barb Augustine. She was a talented watercolour artist who chose to present only one exhibition of her work, in which all 60 of the pieces in the show were sold.

The art supply sale was a cornucopia of drawing and painting tools and paper that took place in the Galt Collective space on George Street North. Laura and Ian purchased a range of materials, some new, some lovingly-used and bearing the traces of a life lived in art. As Laura later subdivided large sheets of watercolour paper for easier transport back to their studio in Hull, she was left with 60 sheets of medium size, and began to ponder associations with the number 60 and possible meanings of its synchronistic doubling.

As Laura and Ian develop and Instant Places Project, chance connections form fresh channels of information that they allow to shape the direction of their work. They decided not to take the sale materials back to Hull, but to leave the paints, mediums, brushes, and paper in Cambridge as the basis for this project. In WATERMARK they honour tributaries that flow across the terrain of art, from physical to virtual representations, from the direct touch of traditional art forms to the ephemeral visual worlds imagined through generative electronics.