Nicola Lane writes:
My 3 self-published Artist Books present collections, either of found imagery or found ideas. 39 Ideas (2011) and 22 Ideas (2012) were inspired by participation in the Art Salon between 2008 and 2011, when I was developing the sharing of ideas as part of my artistic practice. In The Influence of Modernist & Contemporary Art Movements on Wall Top & Street Recycling In West Hampstead (2011), many people thought the images were photographs of interventions that I had created; but the images are all real objects observed on wall tops and in streets as I walked to and from my studio, and photographed on my mobile between 2009 and 2011 - a humorous reflection on the use of walks and interventions in contemporary art.
THE INFLUENCE OF MODERNIST & CONTEMPORARY
ART MOVEMENTS
ON WALL TOP & STREET RECYCLING
IN WEST HAMPSTEAD
with a foreword by Christie Brown
Everyone’s an artist said the great Joseph Beuys; and truly there is an abundance of evidence to support this idea, as artist Nicola Lane discovered when she began to record on her mobile phone the various examples of wall top and street recycling to be found in and around West Hampstead over the last two years.
The influence of Modernism and contemporary art movements on our everyday lives is never far away. It filters through our visual cultural world and emerges through the things we care for, the objects we recycle and the random way we present these discarded things within the context of the street.
Citing the influence of such Modernist giants as Mondrian, Morandi and the Italian Arte Povera movement, as well as major contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, the Wall Top & Street Recycling movement gathered apace in this post-modern era of appropriation and referential information. The careful choice of abandoned materials seen, for example, in After Morandi or the special nature of the wall top as a site for exploration as demonstrated in After Koons 1 and 2, reveals an awareness of these influences within the local community.
Alas, efficient but very necessary new strategies regarding recycling on the part of Camden Council have resulted in a decline in this short-lived creative practice; but Nicola Lane’s excellent modest publication serves to celebrate the Golden Age of the Wall Top & Street Recycling movement and ensures that this elevation of the everyday lives on.
Christie Brown / June 2011
Christie Brown is an artist and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster.
The Influence of Modernist & Contemporary Art Movements on Wall Top & Street Recycling In West Hampstead / hand-made embossed paper & ink jet printed photo paper/ signed limited edition of 30 / Nicola Lane / 2011
In 2011 I created the Ideas Collection Box to encourage visitors to Kingsgate Workshops Open Weekend to generously donate an idea. The collected ideas were scanned and published as a booklet titled 39 Ideas:
Visitors to the Open Weekend were a diverse group from all ages and backgrounds. Very few declined to donate, but most were anxious that their ideas would not be ‘good enough’. Some ideas were whimsical and poetic:
But most ideas seem to reflect anxiety and disillusion, an atmosphere of pessimism re-enforced by the drama of a burglary after the Open Weekend and discovery of the 39th idea:
During Kingsgate Workshops Trust’s partnership with Camden Arts Centre's Test-Bed programme in 2012, I used the Ideas Collection Box to begin the process of participants generating and sharing ideas for a pop-up exhibition.
The group were all young Arts graduates and the ideas reflected this:
22 Ideas / ink jet on coated paper / limited edition of 60 / Nicola Lane 2012
For more information about Test-Bed, see The Art Salon, Sharing Ideas & Didactic Cakes in the projects menu.