Patrick Collier

2013 You Can’t Go Home Again

You Can’t Go Home Again is an aerial landscape produced as part of an ongoing study into collective memory. The focus is on a kind of cultural memory, of places and events which outlive the participants and go on to feature heavily in the general cultural narrative, due to their perpetuation by memorialisation and popular representation. The work is an abstract interpretation of The Great War. The landscape depicted is The Western Front, however it is a depiction of the place as it is in memory, not the space as was. It is an attempt to convey a sense of the imagined place, as it currently lies within the collective consciousness.

This Thursday is the opening of East Pop West, an exhibition showcasing some of the best that London's Art Collectives have to offer inside the former HQ of Innocent Smoothies. I'll be there with the Unconscious Collective, one of many art collectives under the direction of Red Gallery showing all kinds of awesome stuff. This one's not to be missed!

The other day I decided to use this weird lull between show prep and the show itself to do some stuff that I didn't have time to do before. So I went to the workshop and used one of the Laser Engravers to engrave three of my illustrations into A4 pieces of lino.

I prefer screen printing but I've worked in a variety of other print mediums and there's a lot to be said for relief printing. For one thing it's a very simple process. Take your relief carving/engraving, a roller, ink/paint (whatever) something to roll out the ink, I use a sheet of glass from an A3 clip frame.

Roll ink onto the surface of whatever you're printing. . .

. . .and then print. There's no right way to do it exactly, a classic one is using the back of a spoon to rub the paper into the engraving. I sandwiched the lino in between two sheets of MDF with some fabric between the paper and the top sheet of MDF and then I stood on it. Whatever works.

In the past two weeks everyone in the third year of fine art has been working very hard to set up the degree show. We began by clearing the three studios, after which we dismantled some of the temporary walls, and then scraping/sanding/filling the walls and floors before building new walls. As I've mentioned before, the plan for studio 3 was to construct a series of small interconnected rooms for installation work. So on the Monday of prep week 1, those of us who were chosen to have a space assemble in 3 with paper footprints cut to the size of our proposed spaces and with our tutor Tom Hall and technicians Paul Horne and Patrick Taylor, where we planned the layout.

We tried various configurations before settling on a layout that seemed to suit everyone. Paul and Pat were building the walls by the end of the day.

It's strange now to look back on these past weeks of 13 hour days, lack of sleep/food and believe that we're done. But the build went pretty quick. Once Paul and Pat had built the walls of my space and others that formed a corridor to it, I was able to begin building my steps. The idea was to create an illusion of going underground, to do this I (with lots of help) built a 60cm high walkway following the narrow corridor to my space with steps at either end and a ceiling that slopes down toward the entrance.

After building I got some friends to help me paint the space and I installed the lights. . .

And finally on the Friday of prep week 2 I installed my work and completed the installation. It took me a while to figure out where to place them and in what order. I chose not to use one of the prints and four of the plaques because I didn't feel they added anything.

For the past week and a half I've been screen printing my illustrations in this nice corner of Studio 4. It's all gone now. Yesterday was the big studio clear, which was the start of studio prep for the Bournemouth degree show STEM. Walls were dismantled, studio furniture sequestered and anything like peoples work/stuff that remained was ruthlessly broken down and skipped. It was a lot of fun breaking things! and now the three fine art studios are completely empty. Over the next two weeks we will be building a few new walls, scraping, cleaning, filling, painting and making them into a slick exhibition space.

I think the most exciting bit will be building this 'warren' thing in Studio 3. A number of people, myself included require their own space for installation work, so the plan is to build a cluster of small interconnected rooms, making itself a more interesting gallery space. We've cut paper footprints of the proposed spaces and we're gonna to figure out how it will all fit together on Monday. The space that I'm proposing is a room roughly 2x2.5 meters. I also propose to build a platform that raises the floor of a connecting corridor with steps at both ends, the idea behind this is both to make the cluster a more interesting space to navigate and also because I want the audience to feel as though they are descending into a dark and unusual space, when they come upon my work in the exhibition, purposefully manipulating how they interpret it.

I've been doing a lot of screen printing over the past week. I've been printing ten of my illustrations, experimenting with, colour, pressure and materials.

In addition to the screen printing, I used the laser cutter to make some relief printing blocks of toy soldiers and mushroom clouds. I wanted to make them after playing about on Illustrator, making repeat patterns out of the same stuff. I want to draw out a big map of Europe and fill it with prints of these guys.

I don't think I'm the only one working on my EMP who is less than pleased about the amount of bank holidays preventing us from going into uni to do our work but what's worse was learning that today and tomorrow are my last chance to expose screens because the print dept is off limits after tomorrow.