Patterns of Consumption

This series of 59 watercolours represents an intensive two month period of daily reflection and study of habitual behaviour. The work is in dialogue with two collages made by avant-garde artist, Kurt Schwitters: The Pointless Collage (1946) and Merzoil (1939) . The original aim of this work was straightforward: to use my practice to examine aspects of Schwitters' artworks. In particular, to focus on his idea of the 'ready-made' image: his decision to isolate and exhibit a previous mark made, in the act of producing another painting, and to consider how this operates - as a practice - in conjunction with the representational image. I wanted to find ways of interacting with his methods; to establish and experience a practice in which routine movements are archived; to question where the auto-biographical lives in Kurt Schwitters' work. Patterns of Consumption documents a period of engagement with the familiar act of eating, made unfamiliar through its' daily capture and later study. In dialogue with the residues of past consumption and with habitual behaviours, the work studies the quotidian as experienced through the individual and the potency and power of materials as agents.