Exclusion Zone

The Parcel work grew out of my interest in grid forms.

Grid forms act as physical presence and mental constructs in my paintings, as both container and contained.

For a long time my use of the grid was a mapping of the canvas's warp and weft grid structure. I’d become so interested in grids I wrote my first degree thesis referencing Rosalind Krauss’s Essay ‘Grid’ in the Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Pub. Mitt Press.1988 Edition.

I like to write key words on the studio walls relating to what is current, it helps my thinking. For the Grids/Parcel I wrote: contained, enclosed, excluded and others words of that nature. I realised that what  applied to grids also applied to parcels. The act of wrapping functioned in the same way as a sector of a grid. It could isolate, include and exclude. I equated the materials used for wrapping to lines of a grid.

AfterI had started making parcels, other pathways of interest opened up and I followed them for a while.

Exclusion Zone began as an idea that each individual Parcel functioned as part of a grid with the contents of the parcel being equivalent to the interior of a sector of a grid, everything else outside of it being excluded.

The relationship of several parcels functioning in the same way made me think of them as mutually exclusive. To make the individual Exclusion Zone paintings I had to have the canvas laid horizontally. Seeing that the horizontal parcels laid out that way gave me the idea to make the Mutual Exclusion Zone Installation.