Anne Smyth
EXPERIMENTAL PATTERN
The new work came about after watching a gripping and traumatic film (For Samma), made by a young Syrian journalist for her baby daughter, live footage of the war shot over 4 years. Simultaneously finding a book at my local recycle centre,” Modern Small Arms, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Famous Military Firearms’ from 1873 to the present day”. Expecting to have picked up a pictorial encyclopaedia on fishing or gardening as usual, I was alarmed to find this well thumbed copy of a book on guns. I had a feeling of illicit voyeurism, looking in such detail at these killing machines, pure examples of form and function.
I have allowed myself a completely intuitive response to my making, drawing on past feelings and visual connections which have spontaneously surfaced during the making process.
I allowed my hands to work without restraint from my head, bright colours appeared, some transparent some opaque and rough, destroying the glassy sheen. The colours add tension, move the eye, resemble bandages, stencilled lettering, dried blood. I worked intuitively, making moulds, some I cast into, fabricated from sections of a Hair dryer, some were cast over, being simply carved from multiple pieces of plaster. The resulting formed glass, taking on the appearance of fabric, draped softly and smoothly over skin and bones. Underneath the fabric, the ripples of muscles or a phallic shape emerging.
There is an emphasis on a visual ambiguity here, the apparent softness and the actual hardness of the glass.
I picked up on the relationship between the gun and the human form, the butt of the gun fits under the arm and reaches down to the hand, forming the same shape as the pattern for making a blouse or shirt, fitting also from under the arm and to the cuff. These shapes I have known from a child, watching my Grandmother and Mother cutting fabric to make clothes. The gun relates so intimately to the shape of the body.
The spotty fabric of a woman’s blouse, in “Spotty Green Arms Length Rifle” is stitched along its edge, relating the domestic and the female with the combative and the male.
2 Barrels, Landscape + Pierced (Round Drum) fires in both directions. The left hand barrel is made from squares which appear to have small landscapes the other barrel cast from the hose of a vacuum cleaner, is ridged and textured, the violet blue, bleeding away in spots, appearing like the pierced metal, required to dissipate the heat of a gun or caused by its bullets. Sometimes I wanted transparency, other times areas of opacity and unclarity, to form the patchwork of the pieces.
The gun is an extreme example of the visual simplicity created by form and function. The gun is a stark, easily recognisable, emotive form, I have examined this visual paring down of shapes, while also being challenged by the stark reality, of its function. People find the gun fascinating its precision engineering, its lethal power, its danger and destruction. Its purpose is transparent.
As the film is a female experience of war, these pieces are a female response to the gun .
I have instinctively tried to visually soften the guns with colour and pattern, which in turn has related them closer to the domestic environment and their impact on that.
I have found the making of these pieces challenging and compelling, feeling the fragility and vulnerability of life in these glass guns.
THE PANDEMIC EFFECT
The Pandemic has given me time and space, allowing me the sole use of my studio which creatively I have reclaimed and enjoyed. It has allowed me a free rein on my making. I was determined to give myself this imposed time during lock down, to follow a new and intuitive creative thread.
The new work came about after watching a gripping and traumatic film, “For Sama”, made by a young Syrian journalist for her baby daughter Sama, from live footage of the war, shot over 4 years. Simultaneously finding a book at my local recycle centre, Modern Small Arms, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Famous Military Firearms from 1873 to the present day, I had a feeling of illicit voyeurism, looking in such detail at these killing machines, pure examples of form and function.
I have allowed myself a completely intuitive response to my making, drawing on past feelings and visual connections which have spontaneously surfaced during the making process.
As the film is a female experience of war, these pieces ar e a female response to the gun. I have found the making of these pieces challenging, compelling, feeling the fragility and vulnerability of life in these g lass guns.