Nigel Cheney

This Saturday will be the Private View of the 62 group show CTRL/SHIFT curated by Liz Cooper at the MAC in Birmingham. It will include the piece 'Lights Out' that marks the transition from my 25 years in Ireland and my new life back in England.

The piece is substantial being a wall quilt that is 1.4 m high and 3m wide.
It is a departure from my usual practice in that it is photographic and typographic based rather than drawn imagery.
It started from several different strands but the real moment of its inception was in trying to express the sense of loss and moving forwards that embodied leaving a full time teaching post, a home and many friends for a return to family and the ability to focus full time own my own practice.
For many years I have struggled with sleep. Feeling like a zombie and more often like a ghost. Life events in 2014 meant that I spent much of the next few years wondering if I was a ghost, that if events had turned differently would I be here at all. This co-incided with a body of work inspired by Shakespeare, in particular Richard III and focusing on body related costume outcomes. From that there were a series of photographs by Lucas Garvey featuring the model Stephen Quinlan that I felt had more to say.
Having spent 4 years working on a WWI related project I felt that the soldiers still had more to fuel my practice and in particular Edward Thomas's poem 'Lights Out'. Sleep as a metaphor features intensely in this poem so it seemed to be a natural way forward.
Below are some thoughts I shared with Liz Cooper in response to the making of the piece.
I put together some of the notebook pages and samples which they asked for the process space. I have included several of those images in this blog.

I think

1. technological processes.

What drew me to using digital print for this project was a combination of several factors.

I wanted to work with documentation of an article of clothing whilst being worn so photography seemed the obvious route and subsequently pointless to not go the route of digital printing. Speed and timescale. I knew I wanted something as close to life size as possible and therefore technology enabled the upscaling of textiles to a larger format. I was also interested in the quality of pigment print on a more textured ground and how the image (which is inherently sophisticated) would be manipulated by the very simple hand process of quilting.

2. since 2000 I have been using digital print to a greater or lesser extent and the ease of accessing these facilities and the range of substrates (base fabrics to print on) has grown exponentially since then). For this project I felt it was right to shift the practice by working with digital prints of photographic and photoshop manipulated images rather than my own drawings. I enjoyed the layering of meaning and process that by first customising an existing piece of clothing I was bring new memories to the material memory of the garment. That by drawing portraits based on previous photoshoots of clothing I had made there was something of the 'echo' that is the part of memory that haunts me the most. By playing with the notion of the model wearing a garment covered in images of themselves seemed the perfect fit to the representation of the poem. Incorporating text and digital layers of dots and spots also allowed me to allude to the tensions of hard and soft memory. How some factors can be really sharp and in focus whilst others are faded. By documenting the garment on model from several viewpoints allowed me to the fidget of clothing. What I mean by that is how now we may take dozens of selfies before we have the image that we want to represent us to others. In the past photograph was expensive and there was not that luxury. Juxtaposing the contemporary notion of selfie with the more traditional posed studio photos that many soldiers had taken in uniform was part of the fascination.

3, starting point

the poem... I knew I wanted to expand the WW1 theme but look at a soldier out of uniform, of a fabulous prewar life at parties, being a heartthrob etc before going to sleep in the forest as the poem puts it.

Then I wanted a material memory.

This was the suit, (which I still have if you want the actual garment). Part of what was really new was creating the digiutaillay stitched flowers and attaching those rather than using digital stitch to mesh or embed fragments onto a surface. That something so perfect as digital stitch would distort once manipulated and embellished onto a garment. The prints on the suit are sublimation transfer and pigment digital as well as computerised stitch.. as a piece of costume there was a mixture of techniques for impact in a photo rather than as a wearable garment.

4. precious tool

a pencil and a needle. The rest is all negotiable. I use an iMac to work on the images as without a big screen it is ridiculous trying to see how an image will look at actual size. I worked with a photographer and due to timing it became a matter of trust of just giving him the outfit and a 3 page brief of what I wanted and allowing that faith in collaboration to dictate the images and outcomes. He then worked on the selected images to make them perfect. I then took the scans and layered up in Photoshop over what must have ultimately been 1000's of layers. The image changes once printed on fabric and once again when it is stitched. To men this was almost like a photo we would keep in a wallet atet has perhaps become creased folded and faded over time. The tension between our memory of those images and the events they conjure up in our imagination and the actual artefact interest me.