Date: Tuesday, 20th October Focus: Reflection on Rob's sculptural oil-painted panels, focusing on material construction, formal language, and thematic explorations of community and identity.
What? (Experience and Observation)
The core experience was an intense engagement with Rob's constructed, sculptural panels. These pieces are fundamentally objects, not flat paintings. Their edges are intentionally hand-carved, giving them a heavy, substantial presence, all richly covered in meticulous oil paint. Formally, they strongly echo vernacular folk art, particularly the feel of fairground or old Romany wagon painting, which is crucial in placing the work within the context of travelling community heritage.
My focus narrowed onto one panel featuring two men. The figures were ambiguous, with one figure initially suggesting a James Dean character (later corrected to a reference to an 1980s musical band), juxtaposed with a younger Black man standing at a conspicuously awkward distance behind him.
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Colour and Light: The palette is dominated by red with orange accents, creating a tense, dramatic mood. The strong, artificial lighting from the right signifies a nighttime scene, intensifying the shadows and heightening the tension.
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Formal Tension: The spatial arrangement is the piece’s emotional core. The distance between them—behind, maybe intimate, but ultimately uncomfortable and potentially ominous—created an unnerving dynamic that demands a sustained look. The foreground figure, who is white, also holds an emblem/medal.
My initial reaction was a powerful connection to the unsettling concept of the 'other', which brought back the children's rhyme: "my mother told me i never should, play with the gypsies down in the woods." This rhyme was a childhood playground hand-tapping game, making the work feel personally resonant and historically charged.
So What? (Reflective Observation and Abstract Conceptualisation)
The significance of this work lies in how the material choices (carving, folk-art paint) and the formal arrangement (the awkward spacing) serve as anchors for profound social and political enquiries.
Interrogating Identity and Power
The ambiguity of the two figures' relationship raises strong questions of sexuality, intimacy, and power dynamics. The strained distance immediately poses the question: Is this about race power dynamics and control? The white foreground figure holding the medal, with the Black figure positioned behind, suggests a hierarchy and a history of control, subtly referencing American 1950s culture alongside its primary links to travelling heritage. This tension between the figures prevents easy interpretation, suggesting a relationship that is either unspoken, forbidden, or weighted by historical power.
The Hybrid and the Temporal Friction
The work’s importance is amplified by the inclusion of carved Chinese lion heads. These are symbols of protection, but they also shatter the linear historical timeline. This deliberate mixing of Romany folk art, 1980s pop culture, and classical Chinese symbolism creates a brilliant duality:
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It is atemporal because it fluidly combines references from many different times and places.
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It is intensely temporal because this very act of diverse, global, and fragmented synthesis is only possible now, making the work an extremely current statement on cultural hybridity and globalisation.
I conceptualise the work as a materialised statement on the politics of identity. It feels deeply autobiographical, like a scrapbook or diary page, yet simultaneously tackles macro issues like migration and cultural unease within the UK's post-Brexit environment. The work takes the quiet, historical prejudice encapsulated by the children’s rhyme and projects it onto the contemporary stage.
What Now? (Active Experimentation and Conclusion)
The critical lesson learned is the effectiveness of using formal friction—the visual and spatial discomfort—as a key driver for conceptual depth. The entire work is powerful because it uses an archaic, handcrafted form to ask urgent, contemporary questions.
How this learning will improve my practice moving forward:
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Embrace Awkward Spacing: I must move beyond comfortable compositions. I will actively apply the lesson of the "uncomfortable, ominous distance" to my own work, using spatial tension between elements, figures, or materials to deliberately inject ambiguity and emotional complexity into my narratives.
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Challenge Reference Linearity: I will stop relying on simple, single-source references. I will begin to deliberately gather and fuse highly contrasting cultural and time references (like the lion heads and the folk art) to create an atemporal statement. This will make my work a more challenging and powerful commentary on contemporary identity. Could I look more widely at image sourcing?
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Integrate the Personal and the Political: I need to ensure my material choices (e.g., texture, carving) act as a bridge, allowing the personal, autobiographical aspects of the work to directly anchor and amplify a wider socio-political question, just as Rob’s folk aesthetic anchors his work to the discourse of heritage and prejudice. How comfortable am I with the heritage of sewing and feminine bodies? mmmm
The central question that guides this learning is: How can my work use a specific, handcrafted aesthetic - maybe Nana's seamstress roots to become the lens through which we examine contemporary, universal anxieties about the discomfort of personal intimacy? This active experimentation with formal friction and hybridity will be the focus of my next steps. Potentially with the cyanotype explorations?
