There's been quite a gap between this post and my last Tattooed Tumour Box progress report but I'm pleased to say that work on the sculpture/3D drawing is finally complete. I started constructing the piece last year when I planned to build and enter it into the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2014. Although I managed to make all the interconnecting box sections of the piece well in advance of last year's submission deadline, I soon realised that 'tattooed' element of the piece wasn't going to be fully achievable in time (as hard as I tried).
As with most of my artistic projects, I underestimated just how long the drawing side of the work would take. There are several reasons for this. One being the fact that all the drawings are quite intricate and time consuming to develop from scratch, especially since I planned for all the elements to have their own unique qualities whilst still looking like they could coexist in the same universe. Couple this with the fact that, put together, all the forty four separate planes of the sculpture's components add up to a much larger surface area than one might expect, I now clearly see why the piece took so long to complete – although, admittedly, once I missed last year's deadline, work on the piece slowed down for a while whilst I worked on other projects.
Another reason that the drawing process took so long is that each sketch had to be done four separate times – firstly worked out as a pencil sketch in one of my sketchbooks, then traced in ink onto tracing paper, thirdly, transferred onto the sculpture using carbon paper and drawing over the image on the tracing paper, and finally there would be the time consuming task of inking in the carbon ghost image on the sculpture's wooden surface.
Initially, I started off the drawing process by rendering elements of miscellaneous found objects, and morphing them together but once I got into the flow of it, and started to really develop a feel for the world that my drawings evolved from, I mostly abandoned the use of existing source materials, and opted for the freedom of simply making it all up.
To give you a little insight into the multiple processes that I lovingly went through (often whilst working through the night, till five or six the next morning) constructing Tattooed Tumour Box this last year, here are a few of the pencil sketches, tracings, and inked-in sections of the sculpture's surface.
Incidentally, the sculpture is made up of cut-up pieces of antique packing crates, sourced from the Victoria and Albert Museum where I work part-time. You can even see sections of old labels, stencilled numbers, and part of the lettering of “V. & A. M.”, branded into the wood in a charming early twentieth century typography.
There are lots of drawn elements of the piece that I've especially enjoyed creating, and one of them is the underside of the base section of the sculpture, and therefore probably the part that is least likely to be seen. So I thought that I'd give it an airing here. As the circular hole in the center is for the insertion of the pole that makes up part of the work's metal stand, I thought that I'd make it a feature of the overall design, and incorporated a sphincter element to the drawing. The sigils which appear within to outer ring reference occult interests as well as being a tribute to the flamboyantly entertaining comic book writer, Grant Morrison.
To see a larger selection of the drawings that I made in the creation of Tattooed Tumour Box please feel to check out my Oodles of Doodles blog.