Berlin Exhibition: Door to Door
My seaweed paper artwork Today’s Modern Well Dressed Shark will be part of the exhibition ‘Door to Door’ to be held at
LiTE-HAUS Galerie, Mareschstr. 4 VH, Berlin, Germany
from 8 - 24 September, 2022.
The exhibition launch will be on Thursday 8 September 6-8pm.
In March 2020 at the beginning of lockdown, I was invited to be part of ‘Art in the time of COVID-19’ or ‘Art from isolation’. This project began in Australia, and the first Door’to Door’ exhibition was held in Melbourne in February 2021.
The project now includes artists based in the UK & Europe, whose work will be shown in this second ‘Door to Door’ exhibition, along with selected works from the Australian series.
Artists were supplied via email with a page from Newnes’ Pictorial Knowledge 1950’s Encyclopedia (Edited by Enid Blyton) selected at 'random' which was to form the basis of an artwork to be exhibited at some time on the other side of the Pandemic. The page could act as inspiration for the colours, forms, texture, feeling or as a research starting point to dive down the rabbit hole!
My page from Newnes' Pictorial Knowledge Encyclopedia, Volume 1, The story of the World in the days of long ago was ‘Ancestor of the Shark’, which shows images of primitive fish from the Devonian period. They look fairly harmless.
I decided to focus on the contemporary shark, which is usually portrayed as aggressive, fearsome and dangerous, a silent predator that can catch you unawares. As such it is often used as a cultural symbol of looming or unsuspected danger.
My modern well-dressed shark is made from paper, handmade using marine macroalgae (seaweeds) – lowly life forms from the sea which are also often misunderstood and underappreciated. A number of different seaweeds have been used, which have each been individually processed. The pulps were then combined in water to form this single sheet of paper.
