Saturday, 11th June, 2005

Zipcode SELF.0171

You may remember that a while ago, I mentioned that I'd signed a contract with a gallery to sell my work. The whole process is rather exciting — they're currently selecting some of the submissions I made to them in readiness for their launch in September.

In the meantime though, it occured to me that I should be a little bit more, erm, proactive in promoting myself. So with that in mind, I thought I'd offer up one of my pieces (not one I've submitted BTW) for sale.

The image itself, which is part of my ongoing Zipcode series, is 360mm by 450mm, offset-litho printed onto A2 (420 x 594mm) 300gsm silk board. I'm selling an edition of 100 of them, at £35 each (including postage) which is significantly less than what they're going on sale for in September

I've mentioned the Zipcode series before, but you'll excuse me (I hope) if I run through the ideas behind it again...

It started quite a few years ago for me — I was sat on the tube on the Northern Line, staring at the little tube map that they have on the trains. I'd been wondering to myself which station had the most connections, and from the choices on the Northern Line, it was pretty obvious that Kings Cross was a contender. Underneath the little blob for Kings Cross, there were a series of horizontal bands of colour — representing the other lines, and it struck me that these colours were similar to the synaesthetic reactions I tend to have to places, words and people.

So I got thinking, maybe I could produce a series of work which summed up these reactions, in bands of colour. I didn't pursue the idea too much at the time, mainly because I couldn't find a printing process that could achieve the pure colour blocks that I was after.

A few years later though — after I'd finished my MA and developed the moving stripe films that I've become rather pigeonholed with (she said, making a bit of an in-joke ), I started applying the same techniques that I used to make the films to making photography.

I played with quite a few reproduction methods — inkjets, Cromalin® prints, stuff like that — but it wasn't until I approached a local photographic studio that I discovered the rather wonderful medium of Digital C Type printing — which I think uses a laser to expose photographic paper, resulting in, well, a photograph

The joy of this process, for me, was that I was now able to reproduce my stripes in a way that sort of honoured their digital origins. I am, as we all know, a great lover of digital media — I live in Photoshop. I'm also a great believer in the idea that digital media needs to find its own voice — rather than simply being a cheaper version of film-based media.

The Zipcode series are two things to me: they're a celebration of the pixel — an attempt to allow the digital nature of the media to be honest about itself, without resorting to filters and techniques that attempt to adopt the language of traditional film and photography. But they're also a reaction to ideas and feelings that I have about the things around me.

I've done three series so far — BT17, LA1 and SELF. The first two are reactions to places (Belfast and Lancaster), the last one is a series of self-portraits which are probably more like me (or my perception of "me") than any of the photographs on siobhansplace.co.uk.

Contextualy, think Mark Rothko or (especially) Barnett Newman. In fact, the title of the series as a whole — Zipcodes — is a direct reference to Newman's zip motif, but with a digital/coded/site-specific reinterpretation.

...

Anyway. There you go. I've deliberated for quite some time over the pros, cons, and ethics of putting one of my pieces up for sale here. But quite a few people have been asking me about my work, so I thought it would be OK. The prints of SELF.0171 aren't Digital C Types — they're offset litho, which is why I'm not asking for the normal going rate

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to send an email to Laura Handbag to arrange for some of the originals from the LA1 series to be included in the Sparkle Exhibition...