Introducing one artist for May-June 2014


Daniel Downing

­­­‘Pollock’s Tissue box’

Daniel Downing, 2013,

250gsm white card (single folded sheet)

 

This piece is part of a project (Form more worthy of Pollock) that forms an antithesis to the design industry’s foundations, deconstructing the modernist square box of commercialism, replacing it with an organic packaging style. The focus of the work places greater value on form, while sacrificing commercial practicalities, yet maintaining essential function in new designs, that speak new language. The project was also a lesson on shape and form through the experimentation process of manufacturing three dimensional constructs from two dimensional media.

 What would happen if we designed packaging as artists instead of designers, forgetting the ‘price of design’ and making the work more informed by the form? If we discard function entirely, is it still packaging? Must we separate art and design?

Pollock’s Tissue box started as a package concept to hold a bottle of drying oil or olive oil, then I dropped the idea for a while before realising the potential for a tissue box and the obvious association with Demand’s ‘Pollock ghost’.

 

Reading about Pollock’s efforts to convince people that he was a cowboy alerted me to the potential of this design, and the need to revisit the experiment. The flap rolling over the cylinder reminded me of a horse saddle, which became the premise of inspiration from Pollock the man, NOT his art. In addition to his cowboy alter-ego, Pollock liked fast cars, and as most art lovers know, he died in one. The Pollock tissue box transforms into an almost macabre long slender coffin with a car grill and headlights at the front, tail lights to the rear, and a saddle slung over the middle.

 Thomas Demand: and the ghost of Jackson Pollock

Thomas Demand is a German conceptual artist and art teacher known for his photographs of hyper-realistic recreations of known places with strong political or social importance; like the Oval office at the American Whitehouse and Jackson Pollock’s barn studio. Demand questions if souls exist in reproductions of special places, “recreating spaces and images over and over brings them back as icons” , like the Catholic crucifix and fat Buddha statues. While photographing his recreation of Jackson Pollock’s studio in Barn/Streune, Demand found the edges of the image were blurred, he retried and achieved the same unexpected result. In reaction to the movement of his work each time he attempted to photograph it, he questioned if Pollock’s ghost was trapped in the work? “To sentence Pollock’s soul into a Kleenex box was like locking a Jeanie into a beer can.” – What a delightful concept for a sculptural packaging design!