Problems inherent in the material

I think I've mentioned before that  my sister's friend, Ingrid had found all this tape in a skip outside the label factory. Unfortunately it  wasn't very sticky, and the tape itself was relatively heavy. After about a day it would be peeling off the wall. That was good when I was in the studio, making wall drawings, photographing them, then pulling them down, but in an exhibition situation it was  bad. I had to put double sided tape behind it, and in those days double sided tape was thick, so it made a bulge. It was also very hard to remove. Leslie Eastman told me that Robert Lindsay got very angry trying to remove the two works I had in his gallery in 'focus #2, m,m,m...' in 1996. That might be exaggerated, but for whatever reason, Robert Lindsay has never been friendly since, and I have always felt it was to do with the double sided tape on his gallery walls.

Eventually I realised you could actually buy sign writer's vinyl which was more uniformly sticky and came in bigger widths. It's all shiny though, and there's not such a good range of colours, especially in the pinks. You can't  get salmon pink, or musk, to name two colours I would like to use. But on the other hand, if you run out of a colour, you can buy more of it. The pink I used in the Robert Lindsay piece was the last bit of the roll, so I had to get it right first time, and that kind of situation used to stress me out.

I also found that  Nylex would sponsor artists with free 'contact', which is book covering vinyl. They kindly gave me all this  light mauve, lime green and powder blue transparent vinyl, which I could layer,  making darker and lighter areas of colour, kind of like watercolour. I later realised they were giving it away because they weren't making it anymore. More on that when I discuss Primavera in another post.

 I used it in this show called "Gladiator" which was at Grey Area in around March 2008. It was inspired by computer games. The light green shape on the left was made of Contact, plus my tape out to the skip. The rest was made of sign writers vinyl from a place in Dandenong. The pink and silver one was at up at Blue Poles in Greville Street for a while. John Buckley was curating their program. The dark red and gold shape was selected for the Moet and Chandon Prize that year but I did not win. Later still it was curated into a show called 'Fair Game', a show about sport, which Anonda Bell curated in a funny little space at the NGV in Federation Square. By that time I knew that this particular brand of vinyl peeled under hot spot lights, but I felt I had to match the original work, and hoped for the best. Unfortunately it did peel, making me look like an idiot, which I was. I should have got better vinyl even if it did not match the original exactly.

I did this show 'Last of the Big Spenders' at 1st Floor later that year. I had the big room and Damiano Bertoli had the small space, and our work joined up near the edge. You can see his fluoro orange dots in the second picture down.

My work was meant to evoke a nine thirties style ocean liner, kind of a rolling, art deco effect.