Exterior Experiments

Exterior Experiments was described as an ongoing personal project: painting site-specific pattern in places around the world. Shutters, hoardings and blank walls become surfaces for pattern that is worked out to fit the particular site.

The example shown here is a shutter covered with a mosaic of blue, teal and black shapes. Further outdoor walls in a similar spirit appear in the murals section of the work index.

Context

Outdoor surfaces such as roller shutters, hoardings and blank gable ends are some of the most common places for pattern in cities. A shutter is ridged, a hoarding is broken into panels and a wall has windows and drainpipes, so a pattern that fits the site has to work with those interruptions rather than ignore them. Designing it for each surface keeps the piece looking as if it belongs there.

Painting outside also brings practical constraints that indoor work does not: weather, daylight hours, passers-by and surfaces that may be painted over within months. An ongoing series accepts that turnover and treats each site as a separate experiment, recorded in photographs once it is finished.

The shutter in the photograph shows how such a pattern can be built: a field of irregular tiles in a few shades of blue and teal, outlined in black, spread evenly across the ridged metal so that the doors and the frame are absorbed into one surface. The palette is limited, so the eye reads the shape of each tile rather than a picture, and the piece works whether the shutter is up or down.