Fetch

Fetch was an interior artwork for a digital media company of the same name based in Shoreditch, East London. The idea was to use colour gradients in a site-specific way and to make the most of the original architectural features of the workspace.

In practice that means the painting starts from what is already in the room. Pipes, ducts, columns and changes of level become the edges where one colour fades into the next, so the gradients follow the building rather than sitting on it like a picture.

The surviving photograph shows one wall of the office: exposed pipes and a switch box, with a soft grey gradient rising from the floor and fading into white. An assistant helped on the job.

Context

Colour gradients are a demanding thing to paint by hand at architectural scale. A smooth fade from one colour to another has to be blended while the paint is still workable, across surfaces that are rarely flat, and the result has to look deliberate from a desk a few metres away as well as from the far end of the room. Using the existing pipes and edges of the space as boundaries gives each gradient a natural start and finish.

Converted industrial buildings, common in that part of East London, suit this approach well. Exposed ducts, beams and brickwork are usually treated as background, but in a site-specific scheme they become the structure the colour is hung on, so the artwork could not simply be moved to another office without losing its logic.