At Stake

The subject is Rupert Murdoch who seemed an obvious choice for my new series of protraits drawn onto newspaper with fire, via a blowtorch.

It's called 'At Stake'. Has he got a lot at stake? Is he being burnt at the stake? There's a lot at stake for me too as an artist burning onto a product which has already taken me weeks to construct and months to weather.

Background:

In 2008 three newspaper ‘tree trunks’ Tracey had made for the Folkestone Trienniel Fringe were set fire to in the Coastal Park. This began a 2 year experimental phase during which time Tracey tried various ways to draw with fire onto newspaper. The images on her latest work are drawn onto the paper using a blowtorch.

As newspaper comes from wood and is turned back to a wood like product through the tree trunks and ‘prosthetic limbs Tracey makes, so charcoal, that traditional drawing material, comes from burning wood. Rather than drawing with charcoal this process draws to create charcoal. Cycles of nature and cycles of life. Drawn from nature, newspaper is then drawn back into nature and some, drawn on by nature.

Newspaper tree trunks and prosthetic branches, share the stories they’ve been charged to keep. Stories both from the trees they come from and from the human world branded onto the newspaper.  As the rings on the trees offer information on the land over time, the pages of the newspaper are steeped in human history.  Information, truth, opinion, fact, lies, propaganda; fed through the thin pages for all to contribute to and all to feed on. History – the writing on the wall.

Reshaping the stories into new narratives in 2 dimensions, the wall mounted newspaper works seek to reference the trees before the newspaper, the stories of the newspaper and new words suggested by the worked newspaper. Each wall based piece comes with its own story.  Sometimes in these stories it’s not easy to see the wood for the trees.