Analysis of tondo collages based around Sheringham Park and Old Catton Park

Within this blog entry I wish to analyse the components which make up my more recent works in order to test whether they are effective in achieving my aims. Since visiting Sheringham Park and gathering images as part of my research I also took a trip to Old Catton Park in Norwich also conceived and landscaped by Humphry Repton. The new collages which I have created are loosely based around both of these parks, making use of photographs taken during my respective visits.

Fragments, Mixed Media Collage (based on photos taken at Sheringham Park), 57 x 57cm.

Why use the tondo?


I have found that the tondo has been an effective tool within my recent work as a framing device for the compositions. My most recent works, utilize Sheringham Park and Old Catton Park as my subjects with the circular composition taking on a number of functions.

Round and spherical things in nature are considered to be perfect, complete and stable. Within the context of these works the circle simultaneously unifies and works in opposition to the composition, which consists of disjointed/disparate planes and discordant/unharmonious colours.

A round or spherical composition is an effective way to depict another world. In this instance the other world is that of C19th Victorian England encompassing values, which are no longer applicable to contemporary society including a regimented, divided class system and ideas around power, dominance and colonization. The circle helps to accentuate the otherness of the compositions, making them appear although they are being observed through a portal, or window, which captures a particular moment in history.

Study from Old Catton Park, Mixed Media Collage, 37 x 37cm.

A round or ‘concentric’ system places an emphasis on matter/force of some kind being concentrated around a center, such as planets circling the sun, children round their mother or the fruit of a peach around its pit. By using a circular frame to surround the subject rather than a conventional rectangle or square format it places extra weight on the composition as a self-contained unit around which we the observer must navigate. 

Nick Cave's (1959-) piece 'constellation' is a sequined and beaded work, inspired by a memory from his childhood of looking up to the stars with his brothers on a summer night. He recalls exclaiming:

'It's right there look, it's the place of innocence where something so mundane can be so transformative.' www.denverartmuseum.org/article/staff-blogs/tondos-installation-images

Cave created his tondo pieces in order to create the impression of independent worlds, dispensing with issues relating to judgement:

'The work hides gender, race and class, you're forced to come to the work without judgement. That's the bottom line. We live in a world that wants to categorize and put things in a particular place.'
www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/entertainment/arts-theater/nick-cave-whose-works-are-at-norton-museum-uses-ar/nMB63/

Tondo, Nick Cave (2012) Mixed Media

Constellation, Nick Cave, 2006, Mixed Media

 

Why use images that have been collaged and coloured red?

Fragments I, Mixed Media Collage (based on photos taken at Old Catton Park), 57 x 57cm.

Using collage within my work involves taking reproduced images from the real world and manipulating and combining them in order to create art forms. Not only is this able to be carried out relatively quickly and efficiently, it also allows for the imagery to be combined with painting, drawing and other visual forms as well as providing the potential for manipulation of the printed subject matter via burning, cutting, tearing and layering.

In creating these pieces I was dealing with issues relating to memory, place and walking as well as the underlying processes around which memories are formed. Sebald’s account of walking and observing the landscape leads to large sink holes opening up in his sub-conscious mind triggered by the landscape, which he just steps into evoking his own graphic description of human suffering, loss and trauma. The act of creating a collage alludes to the process of a layering of memory constructed via the passing of time, whilst simultaneously allowing for the potential of slippage into a sub conscious realm via the juxtaposition of imagery.

'There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!' The Yellow Wallpaper and selected writings, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2009, pg 13

I was partly inspired by the short story the yellow wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892 telling the narrators story of being confined within a bedroom in order to recover from her nervous depression. On account of her confinement she begins to descend into psychosis, becoming obsessed with the colour and pattern of the wallpaper. In the end she starts to believe there are women creeping around in the wallpaper and that she is one of them. By tearing, burning and juxtaposing different imagery within my collages I hoped to create a visual impression of disorientation on account of the different shapes and images which appear within the collage.

I have manipulated the surfaces of the pieces by placing together imagery, photographed by myself of Sheringham Park and Old Catton Park. Both parks were designed by the English landscape architect Humphry Repton and were designed with ideals strongly relating to the picturesque and its association to the beautiful and the sublime. Within my compositions I have presented this as fractured and discombobulated, so that it is hard to decipher in a literal fashion, whilst balancing precariously on a background of red in the case of the tondo inspired by Sheringham Park and Grey in relation to the tondo inspired by Old Catton Park. I sought to invoke a sense of brooding, melancholy and the feeling that the sub-conscious mind is operating below the veneer of the landscaped exterior. The backdrop of the compositions contrast effectively with the greens that make up the foreground symbolizing nature and relating to the picturesque.

What are the pieces about and do they actually deal with these things?

Study from Sheringham Park, Mixed Media Collage, 37 x 37cm.

My original intention for making these pieces of work and the original three pieces tied in with ideas relating to walking, memory and place with a strong influence derived from W G Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and the idea of the landscape acting as a trigger for other often darker subconscious memories and associations. 

'I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience? W G Sebald, Rings of Saturn, 1999, pg 79-80

Although related this differs from the pieces I made which dealt with ideas relating to invasive species. Whereas the invasive species collaged tondos served to illustrate the changing values and meanings of objects within the landscape as well as acting as a direct metaphor for Victorian colonization, I hoped that the collages inspired by Sheringham Park were related more to the idea of place memory.

In creating these pieces they raise a number of questions: what do large parks and estates like this tell us about the values and ideals of society around the time they were created and how do these translate into the values and meanings recognised in contemporary society? What are the darker and less desirable elements lurking beneath the decorative surface of the estates and landscaped gardens of the aristocracy?

I see these pieces functioning as a sketch or a test for more substantial finished pieces, constructed on a much larger scale with the possibility of introducing more painterly areas alongside the paper collage. By working on a larger scale it would open up the possibility of making the pieces more immersive with the creation of more discernible tension between the foreground and background.