Papers Made - Papers Printed

In the early 90's I was working partly in Sheffield. I was privileged to be running Yorkshire ArtSpace where I met some terrifically interesting and talented people. One amongst many was a chap called Piers. His background was quite exotic and he was really into the digital revolution at a time when very few of us had much idea about it. In particular Piers was into digital image manipulation and had the very latest kit. Nowadays we all have stuff thats a deal more sophisticated but back then it was like he had access to alchemy! I'd been experimenting with it in a very clumsy way but Piers helped me enormously.

One idea I was working on tied together a series of purely abstract paintings with a notion of my grandfather producing paper that could have been the very paper on which I worked. I was fascinated by the fact that he had spent his working life in a paper mill in Hele, near Bradninch in Devon making papers whilst I spent a part of my life seeking out suitable papers to make pictures with.

I found a picture, probably taken in the late 40's or 50's, of my maternal grandfather, Wilfred Daniells, pulling a sheet from a paper press and liked the idea that I could be observing this process. Piers helped me by taking a series of images where we adjusted the light and tonality to make it appear that I, in my mid forties, might have been looking over his shoulder. The final product, a four foot by three foot print, of the above with the text Papers Made, Papers Printed was combined with the six framed paintings on paper and exhibited in an exhibition of staff work (by this time I was working at the University of Derby as Assistant Dean of Art & Design) in 1994 0r 5.