SPENT - Third iteration

The spent matches in this print originally stood (or fell) for the thousands of days since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in March 2011 and the suffering of that country’s people. The body of work hoped to raise awareness of and represented both the days passed and the lives lost in that deeply complicated conflict in 2016.

Echoes of that futile war are now heard from Ukraine and has reminded me of the feeling of the despair I felt when making the Syrian series.

Wooden sticks, in random patterns have been positioned in bundles, lines, circles and splatters of burnt wood and transformed into Intaglio Etchings using a photogravure process; some of the prints in this series juxtaposed the delicate and evocative beauty of colour against the stark reality of discarded and changed lives.

Safety matches burn at a rate of around 30 cm per hour, at what rate do the displaced people of Ukraine deteriorate and lose hope? Some matches stand upright, others have fallen over or are scarred and others are at the point of disintegration; these works signify the beauty of the human spirit when pushed to its limit.

Another iteration of this series can be applied to the Environmental crisis, with the IPCC declaring in their ‘Synthesis Report’ that we are 90 seconds from Doomsday. The work pictured here, is from a new series that layers spent matches against an Eco Print made by nature.

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