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  • Fragmentation: - Julia Spicer
  • The idea of ‘fragmentation’ and reinvention is at the heart of my practices, revealed in an ongoing engagement with developing narrative.

    This submission takes as its starting point a largish work (111 x 81 cm) made (on my Foundation course in 1991) in mixed media on paper. This early attempt at abstraction was initially carefully preserved, but over the years suffered wear and tear, eventually lying folded up and forgotten in the back of a cupboard.

    Some time ago I made the decision to destroy it, tearing and shredding it into pieces. Like ‘the spot on the wall and the coals in the grate’ 1 the scraps however were visually irresistable. What started as a deconstruction (an ‘art déchiré’?) became a radical reconstruction when I became intrigued by previously invisible lines and forms within the torn fragments and started to name them.

    I obviously have no recollection of the intent (if any) behind the original work but the titles I gave the ragged fragments - the ‘Admirable Inventions’ 2 which give the series its title - began to reveal their own narrative – ‘accidental bird’, ‘blood rock’, ‘cherry blossom’, ‘red mountain’, ‘blossom falls’, ‘spilt ink’, ‘the body in the river’, ‘black mountain/red sea’ etc. I had become a (re)viewer of my own work subject to the disruption of my own expectations and providing for a multiplicity of interpretations and discoveries which were clearly not visible in the first making.

    So the ‘original’ work was destroyed as intended but in its place are over twenty fragments which re-cohere into a number of stories dependent on their framing (and naming).

    As Calvino says: ".....what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first…”

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    Footnotes
    1 Max Ernst quoting from Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting extracted from Chipp, Herschell B (Ed): Theories of Modern Art, University of California Press, 1968, pp. 428 - 431
    2 ibid