Bleeding Walls 2022

13 Aug 2022 : The Lockup, 90 Hunter Street, Newcastle NSW Australia

A durational artwork action. The Bender was an extravagant night for The Lockup after a couple of years of lockdown. Styled as “Newcastle’s long awaited and favourite night of art mayhem”. I was one of many artists who presented work through the evening. The Lockup is a former prison and my work was located in one of the small historical cells. My proposal was to enact an intimate and physical engagement with the space and materials to make the walls ‘run with colour’. Colours running, bleeding, erasing, spreading, dripping. This was a calligraphic action, drawing with paper onto paper. Spending 3 hours in the space, climbing continuously up and down a ladder, this was a condensed image of ‘doing time’. With my back to the audience I applied rolls of different coloured crepe paper to a ground of watercolour paper which filled one wall. Wetting the crepe paper I then formed it to different shapes and pressed it into the paper to cause the colours to bleed out. From time to time I outlined the shapes created in charcoal. At the end of the evening I removed all the crepe paper sections to leave their imprint beneath, soaked into the supporting paper background. I could not splash or throw materials as I would have liked due to heritage restrictions, so the runs of colour became the predominant feature. This work had its precedents in my performances Colour Bleed (Melaka 2017 & Chengdu 2018) and Rain on my Parade (Kandos 2021).

Artwork dimensions: 3m x 2.4m Materials: watercolour paper 200gsm, 6 white plastic buckets, 1 black rubber bucket, 24 rolls of coloured crepe paper, charcoal sticks, water, pins and nails, hammer, scissors, pliers, ladder, 2 coloured plastic bowls, plastic scoop, small stainless steel bowl, white costume (trousers, shirt, apron)