Cloud Study III

Cloud Study III

This is the most recent iteration of a series of works based around this quotation, which are described in more detail in a blog on this website titled Cloud Study.

To recap briefly: the quote is taken from Cloud Studies, by Arthur W. Clayden, published by John Murray in 1905. When I first read it, I wanted to do something with it, and settled on making a boxed edition of the text punched out on rolls of Dymotape, with the title – modified from Clayden’s – Cloud Study. The letters of the text, blistered in white from their extrusion from the black vinyl, had themselves a filmy, cloudy, diffusion.

Later the text appeared on a 5x5 checkerboard grid of alternate blue and white button badges, one word per badge. This was Cloud Study 2, shown in 1995 at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in ‘nonnonstop’, a show of printed work and source material. Another version appeared in ‘Standing on Trifles’, a travelling show of artists’ axioms curated by Les Buckingham for Southampton City Art Gallery.

Cloud Study III summons later technology, being set using Adobe Illustrator and giclee printed. The cloudiness here is intended to represent blackboard chalk, the same message written and erased over and over by several different hands.