Piecework

Renaissance Art is an unlikely source for ready-made abstractions. In Piecework the drapery that was often painted in the Master’s workshops by assistants becomes a new ‘found’ resource of material.. When snapped on a mobile phone, these detailed studies of drapery are liberated from the grand narratives and technical challenges in 15 and 16 century paintings. And perversely, when this context is removed, the images exhibit fundamental qualities of abstraction—form, line, colour, texture, and composition. Piecework brings together contradictory aesthetics of the Renaissance, Modernism and Pop with analogue and digital reproduction. But regardless of these pairings and processes a sensory suggestion of the unseen bodies that were painted more 6 centuries ago remains.