Mark McDean: Collisions, July 2011 - 39 X 18 cmSometimes you can just swim through life and nothing much occurs to sway you from your course. At other times the complex fabric of life - strange occurrences, unexpected events, accident, injury, emotion, intrudes into your very being and creates a swell in your world schema that must be addressed no matter how unpleasant or hard to bear. In Mark's latest response to my previous artwork he has reconfigured an image of the homely, comfy crocheted shawl given to him by friends that he exhibited in his 2010 exhibition Trouble Set Me Free, by photographing and fashioning it into a shape and then mounting it on card. Colliding with this shape, indeed at the threshold of the space at the edge of the image, is a loose fishnet construct, knotted and tied with silk rope thread. This hybrid form suggests not only the impact of the physical, tactility of the materials used in opposition to the flat digital image, but also calls to mind real as well as virtual spaces. The orderliness of the crocheted pattern on the forward section of the work forms a complimentary, but, all the same a strong contrast with the Macramé scrawl, and it is in this way that Mark calls forth the fact that it was sailors throughout history and in various cultures who employed the craft of knotting to decorate objects whilst at sea. Indeed The Spanish word macramé is derived from the Arabic migramah (مقرمة), which means ornamental fringe or embroidered veil. This veil then, speaks to the netting I used to create disguise in my artwork, however, although mine referred to the domain of the feminine, here, the veil is primarily associated with the masculine.
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