Simon’s piece Untitled (TN14411), 2011, is a dense cityscape, what looks like a layered collage made from newspapers, with holes revealing more holes revealing more holes. It is just one daily newspaper, with all the text and images removed from the facing pages. Together, it’s a portrait of the day without content, becoming an architectural structure and a narrative comment. It is the carrier of information laid bare.
Leahy-Clark’s practice has been working for the past few years almost exclusively with newspaper as a material, mostly on these ‘creations through removal.’ Before, they had been shown as a floor-based work, as in the 2007 Creekside Open, and the studio shot below; while recently, as in this year’s Jerwood show, a framed, wall-based paper allows us to look through the careful layers more fully.
Each cutting then becomes a portrait of the paper’s structure, but also of the day itself.
The countless scraps from this process have led to a new series of collage work, a body of work that began through seeing an image of collagist Gwyther Irwin working in his studio in his 2008 obituary. An image of a piece in that line of work featured in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.
Simon is currently working an a large-scale work, an image of a large boat liner that has been docked for decades.
