SUNLEY SMITH: TEXT

365 canvases were made (one for each day of the year). The canvases were identical in proportion, representing a form of hand made mass production and multiples of the same thing.

“ At the time I was finding all aspects of painting very repetitious and limited in terms of content and representation. I wanted to break the combinations and the very system of it. ‘Do something else’ – just kept running through my mind. It became a sort of art of quantifying as well as destruction. At the same time I was doing this, I was also painting panels of colour and taking them into the outside environment to reveal the difference and absurdity of trying to represent natural situations with paint from a tube or a tin”

At the time of performing/documenting this action, the desire was to do something ‘more’ with a painting. Following the Duchampian notion of readymades ‘using a Rembrandt perhaps as an ironing board’.

The process of making the work became tiring, shadowing my own feelings of what I was seeing and feeling when looking at yet more and more paintings in galleries with always the same techniques and similar ideas. The throwing of the canvases became extremely physically taxing, yet also very entertaining, as well as somewhat absurd and profound.

The paintings were thrown as far as I could pitch them, in a field, sometimes individually, sometimes in great clusters. Where they landed - they were marked and measured, painted with the number equalling the meters that they had travelled. The whole work was for me a project that worked in a number of directions with varied meanings.

Once all 365 paintings were all thrown and measured they were installed as an installation and the film of their flights and journeys. They were exhibited with mud and grass stains, in a perpetual looping line, indicating a never ended confusing mass, lines of flight and endless computations.