Other people’s sky

Other people’s sky is made from dissected landscape paintings by amateur artists purchased from thrift stores, flea markets and online markets. Once the sky section of these paintings is removed, the rest of the painting is discarded. The sky sections are ordered into a shelf-based mashup of artistic capabilities and styles that contains (faint) echoes of romanticism, impressionism, photo realism, cubism, expressionism, minimalism and other traditions of art. Although the paintings used in this work are not part of an intellectual scaffolding around contemporary art or art history, their presence in Other people’s sky seeks to blur the zones between notions of high and low art, the discarded and the prized, the ordinary and extraordinary and the singular and the collective.

The sky is presented as both a natural phenomenon and a persistent subject in the numerous narratives of art history. There is a certain irony (and perhaps futility) implicit in wanting to suggest the ethereal, endless and expansive quality of the sky through a massing of small painted fragments. Pointing towards an infinite breadth and depth of artistic expression, the shelf-based assemblages of ‘sky extractions’ or ‘pieces of sky’ are deliberately fluid and malleable. The elements of work can be constantly re arranged in new combinations and permutations which can be scaled from an intimate single shelf of elements to a room sized installation.

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