The scale of Woollenline, a huge landscape drawing, its domestic, social, political and economic arrangements forced a new way of working that now impacts on my current work, exploring identity.
Slowly drawing alongside people both caring for and living with dementia inspires a subconscious shift of both pace and scale.
I remain preoccupied by the materials of life. The fleshy substance of it: literally when encountering an organ ( brains) pickled in formaldehyde and then again when travelling with the conversations afforded by mid stage Alzeimher’s.
And not only those affected with an enhanced alteration of their brain, every one of us sees and experiences the world differently forcing my interrogation of the use of pronouns : who is the ‘they’, ‘you’ and ‘we’?
The scale of Walkers: I, you, we & they could have been infinite but is determined by the relationship of the piece to the initial prints, hand-held clay tablets carrying images of Sumerian glyphs, the pronouns.
Each step of exploration brings new insights: Someone loved a series of portraits inspired by residents of a care home are made of hundreds, if not thousands of individual pieces, paper, beads, rags, glass. Each different personality requiring its own materials.
The work echoes an enquiry into my own life, a piece made from over 23,000 pieces of painted paper, Day’s of my life.
Then there is my brain.
Over 400 images from the MRI scan I volunteered for at University College London.
New work.
Pip Woolf 