Fingerprints! Who are we?? What's going on here?

I couldn't have put it better myself...
"His most recent work, "Fingerprints", is a series of large intricate steel reproductions of individual's fingerprints. This series invites the viewer to appreciate the wonderfully complex nature of the fingerprint's organic form which is all too easily lost in its everyday meaning as the quintessential representation of individuality."
Zack Booth Simpson writing about the fingerprints in steel of Frank Plant, Austin, Texas, 2001







I kinda remember when it hit me, vaguely... I had already been working with the drawings in steel for a couple of years and was mostly concerned with the replication of everyday objects, coffe cups, corkscrews and the like. I was definitely in Barcelona in the studio. I went downstairs and began to look up fingerprints on google. In some dark alley of the internet I stumbled across a reasonably good image of a scan of an arrest record of Malcolm X with his fingerprints, I downloaded it and I still rue the day.





Back in the day before I went completely techno I would print out a copy of the fingerprint do a graph over the top and then transfer that times ten in chalk onto the floor of my studio, very laborious. Now I just print the whole thing out on A4's and cut and tape them together. Equally laborious but perhaps a smidge less tedious. I was on to something...




Wow, organic forms, beautiful I really liked the result and not only that I got great responses from the posse that would normally come around the studio and gawk, drink beers and generally get up to things disreputable.
I continued to ruminate on the subject and it took me to all sorts of strange places, a little bit like a labyrinth.... Yes a labyrinth! And yes a portrait, a hyper realistic portrait. Just a bit of a twisted angle on the age old idea of portraiture. Like always I like the graphic quality of the bars of steel and with the fingerprint they meld together to make a very bold portrait. the vast majority of these that i did are about one meter to one meter twenty wide and one meter fifty to one meter sixty high.



Big suckers using twelve millimeter round steel bar. Up until this point these were the first works that I did that I really had problems to get around the studio, they weigh a ton. After the first couple though you realize the creative work is done and it's really just about fabrication and a lot of fabrication at that. Cutting, bending, grinding, cutting, bending, grinding.... and on and on forever and ever.
The figerprints have treated me well and I have exhibited them far and wide across the land and I even branched out into what I consider the collective fingerprint of human communities, maps. The photo below was taken at Sala Can Felipa from a juried show called "Dades Essencials" from the 9th of December 2003 until the 10th of January 2004.








The map shown here is that of Paris. I have always liked maps and with creating this one I wanted to try and strip it of it's normal meaning as a tool for orientation and navigation and give people an oppurtunity to look at it as only a complex formation found in nature, not unlike the fingerprints. Maps as design, as semi calculated evolving grids and networks with their own inherent aesthetics.

Chuck Taylor's (Converse All Stars)... And Other Icons

In early 2003 I was contacted by Paul Collier, an American architect based in Paris who had seen some of my work through a mutual contact. He asked permission to maybe use some of my work in proposals he did for clients. Personally I prefer architects to gallerists so I readily agreed. About six months later he got in contact again and said that he had spoken with a client about a yet to be developed piece of mine for the entrance of an office building that they had recently rennovated. So we began to throw some ideas back and forth. He mentioned that the building was home to various design businesses and photographers if I remember correctly. The space it needed to fill was about three meters fifty by about two and a half meters of usable space high. I also remember him saying that something with a sense of humor would be good.

"Chuck Taylors", Steel, 356x98cm, 2004

Hence after about five or six ideas that fell by the wayside we settled on a drawing of a photo I had taken of... yep you guessed it, my Converse All Star sneakers. Or Chuck Taylor's or just simply and affectionately "Chucks".

"Chuck Taylors" (Detail), Steel, 2004

Now I've been wearing these shoes, not this particular pair mind you, for the better part of twenty five years. I remember my first pair and how I proudly strode into the YMCA thinking that they were actually going to make me a better basketball player, they didn't.... But it was like being introduced to a club of people in the know. I wore black chucks all through high school and college where they became billboards for my favorite political staements and musical tastes and even now I have a beat up pair lying around, yea the ones in the picture up top.





Sending the chucks off to Paris




Also working with images that are in some ways icons or have some sort of social weight is something that I'm interested in. Taking images that first and foremost attract me compositionally with the added weight of whatever social or cultural imagery they represent. such as the images below




Brain, Steel, 140x140, 2001
The consummate image for intelligence and or human awareness (or stupidity for that matter).



Boombox, Steel, 150x118, 2002

Cultural icon of black america c.1975, revisited and embraced by white middle class suburban america early 1990's until present. This piece got sucked into a larger Installation called F2T? or Free to Talk?


Pistol, Steel, 202x152, 1999

I got very strong reactions to the pistol, I don't know if something can be quietly violent but if it can it's this image. The pistol obviously is a fairly good icon for violence, for me I'm really attracted to the composition as well. It has to be said that a gun is a tool, whether for shooting beer cans in your backyard or more nefarious uses. I also like most things that represent the evolution of a design and hence could be considered the sum of our knowledge at the point of their fabrication, in a form follows function sense. Regardless it's a potent image and now lives in Brussels.


Heart (Various), Steel, 160x120, 1999

Human Compassion, Love, Life... etc....



Headphones, Steel, 128x117, 2001

Image for everything DJ, electronic culture, and so on.... as is the below image




Tone Arm, Steel, 157x58, 2004

One Man's Garbage....

Barcelona and Spain in general are going through a period of prosperity and growth, and the construction industry is one of the driving forces behind the unsustainable economy. I am truly amazed at the amount of growth, a reflection of that growth is the amount and variety of containers that you see sprinkled on the streets to handle the refuse that spills out of these sites. The most common of these is the construction sack which is ubiquitous on the streets of Barcelona. This is basically a very strong bag of maybe 1.2 square meters that you buy at the local hardware store. Included in the price of purchase is that once the bag is full you call up a number normally printed on the side of the bag and magically within a day or so a truck appears and lifts it in to the back of the truck and whisks it away to construction sack heaven.


The sack, more common on the streets of Barcelona than pay phones and mailboxes put together.



At some point in time I began to look at these objects with different eyes, they are ever present yet somehow they blend into the urban landscape to the point that you don't even register them. They come, they fill, they overflow, they disappear leaving a residue as the only testament to their existence. Like some wierd temporary organic installation. Anyway they caught my interest and I began to plot out a way of making some sort of creative registration of them.






Now it's 2002 and I have recently acquired my very first digital camera, which is going to change my life. No more trips to the camera store to develop a roll of film that will probably yield 4 interesting photos out of 30 at the low cost of 20€ or something. No digital photography liberated me from all that. Now I could click to my hearts delight or at least until my memory card was full and delete all the garbage (no pun intended), in the privacy of my own computer.


Previously if I wanted to use photographic material I would have to develop the photos and scan them, now I just download them directly onto the hardrive and into photoshop or whichever program I happen to using. also This would be my first excursion into actually incorporating original photographic material in the finished work. The manner in which I am working in steel has it's limitations as far as the amount of detail you can recreate.





So the idea was to recreate some of the information in steel and then have photos blown up to the according size and glued onto pvc plates that I cut to the exact dimensions of the photos then mount them on the drawing in steel


Basuralona Saco I, Steel, PVC, Photo, 95x74, 2002


It wasn't long before I began to look at not just the construction sacks but trash containers of every shape and size, domestic dumpsters, recycling bins everything. These objects play a role in the everyday existence of the city dweller and by recreating them in steel and photo I wanted to people to focus and think about this small detail of their daily experience. I proposed the series for an exhibition of BAC! ( Barcelona Arte Contemporanea ) Organized by La Santa and it inaugurated in November of 2002.

Basuralona I, Steel, PVC, Photo, 172x83, 2002



Basuralona II (Man), Steel, PVC, Photo, 118x85, 2002

Technical description of construction