R.C.T.P.S.C.P.F/2.
R.C.T.P.S.C.P.F.
2017 - the present. Graphite on Paper. Dimensions variable.
R.C.T.P.S.C.P.F, or, Recycled Car Tyre Playing Surface Concrete Poetry Frottage, is an ongoing series of rubbings made from fragments of shredded car tyres, collected from the surface of a children’s playground.
Formally, these images sit midway between drawing, typography and collage, referencing the practices of Hausmann, Schwitters, Chopin and Cobbing among others. Perhaps most closely related to Concrete Poetry, these work are glossolalial, but also political and ecological, as they tap into a profound irony found at the collision between the personal and the public in urban centres and beyond.
The numbers and letters that can be scavenged from this weird topsoil are fragments of an arcane and complex techno-regulatory code – perhaps for far-future archaeologists to decypher. Conceived as a way of simultaneously preventing injury and finding a creative ‘solution’ to an insoluble problem, the soft bouncy scree-like surface of a recycled rubber playground is a penultimate resting place for objects that have already shed a significant amount of their mass into the air as particles. These can persist as much as 8 times longer than exhaust emissions and are also significant soil and groundwater pollutants. As children are increasingly driven about more as a response to safety concerns, this fine black aerosol is correspondingly released, breathed in and embedded into young lungs as they run back and forth, climb, slide and fall onto rubber, not getting ‘hurt’, all the while creating a familiar cacophony...
R.C.T.P.S.C.P.F/2. Detail.
R.C.T.P.S.C.P.F/3.
R.C.T.P.S.C.P.F/3. Detail.