8/02/2018 - WHITE TIGER PASTING 1

I quickly felt the constraints of winter weather when planning a time to paste my tigers up. One quick look at the weather forecast told me to expect subzero temperatures and rain every night for the next couple of weeks except Thursday, so I had to act quick and prepare all of my tigers for pasting that night.

I further intervened with some of the tigers by censoring out their eyes with thick black pen. This drew attention also to the damaged eyesight of the tigers, as well as giving them anonymity and obscuring some of their true identity. I thought this looked quite effective, and made the icon of the tiger even more powerful. I was also aware that I wanted to make the image of the tiger as variable as possible throughout all of the pieces. I wanted this to try and give each tiger its own induviduality, and attempt mark them out as characters and induviduals in their own right, whilst also keeping the pervading sense of the image the same, and thus increasing the general presence of the iconography on the streets through repetition, as is a key practice within street art.

With the handprint variations, I wanted to put these up on the streets because of the political and evocative powers of the handprints and images, but was also aware that cutting directly around the handprints as I had with the tigers may decrease their impact, and lessen their effectiveness. So I came up with an alternative idea of cutting further shapes from the background paper, to preserve the forms of the prints and also add an extra level to the designs.






I thought this worked effectively and was a good way of solving the problem of cutting around the handprints. It also gave an additional geometric element to the works, and definitely increased the induviduality of these pieces.




I also tried this cutout geometric technique on some of the normal pasteups. Doing this also allowed me to utilize some of the spare paper around the designs I didn't tesselate, and mitigate or atleast begin to justify some of the paper wastage.

Once I had cut through the majority of my tigers, I stopped for a minute to take stock, and realised I probably wouldn't be able to get through so many in one night. So I seperated 35 of the strongest pieces and left behind a selection of duplicates and some of the remaining uncut works. This was still quite an impressive stack however, and I found myself hoping the good people of Norwich liked tigers!!

I mixed three tubs of wallpaper paste to hopefully cover me for so many designs. Although normally I like to mix my own paste, under these harsh weather conditions I wanted to give my pieces the best chance possible and take no chances.





   I tried to find locations where I could open dialogues, provoke interest or generally use the circumstances to inform and complement my placement of the artworks. For example in one place I found a sprayed luminous yellow line, and placed the tiger with a yellow stripe behind the eyes ontop of this (see picture, although this was taken the day after). I also found a poster near this piece which asked 'Hi how are you?'. I pasted a tiger underneath, attributing the words to it and creating a dialogue between the piece and audiences. The concern of the tiger is heavily anthropomorphised with colloquial dialect such as 'hi', and in turn then expects an answer or response. To recieve concern from the tiger also causes the viewer to return the favour, and begin to wonder how the tiger might be doing also.

I tried putting up a silver tiger on an equally silver wall near the birdcage, but found that the slippery surface of the shiny paper obviously didnt take to the inks as well, as I immediately accidentally wiped off a large portion of the tigers head on the first downward stroke. I feel like had I been slightly less enthusiastic with this first stroke, this disfigurment would have actually added to the piece, and given it the same obscurity as some of the other works, but alas I think I went slightly too far with this first destructive stroke and removed a little too much design. I left the piece there however as, even in a destroyed state, it still increased the prescence of the iconography on the streets.

I think the red pigments had not quite properly settled either, as I lost two designs featuring the red pigment (one of which was 3D) in a similar fashion as well. However the flourescent pink designs worked well and held up. I think part of the disturbance may be down to the force I used to paste the works up, as well as just general wetness and difficult weather conditions potentially causing issues also. Because of these technical difficulties however I felt like I wanted to give it another go on a seperate occasion, weather permitting, and try to take my time a bit more, with less tigers to get up in a single evening.

I also experimented with overlaying multiple tigers, elluding to the copied/reproduction nature of genetics and selective breeding, going through many generations to select ideal traits. The lighter prints definitely worked less effectively on newsprint when pasted than the darker versions. As this is the first time I had experimented with bright single colour prints in this format (previous works were either full colour cmyk or greyscale) this was definitely all part of a new learning curve for me as a pasteup artist. The cutout geometric sections worked brilliantly, and helped to generally integrate the design into the wall and also build up an artistic space around the central image.

I started heading home with just enough paste to hit a few spots on the way back, including a phone box on Earlham road which featured a gorgeously curving fluro pink W. When I arrived back I took out the remaining tigers and found 11 leftover, meaning I had managed to place 24 successfully, including a few which as I already mentioned, were unsuccesful during pasting. I was really happy with this, however to my horror a short while later realised it had suddenly started raining heavily, making me unsure whether all of my efforts would have been completely in vain! Such is the nature of the art though, and it made me all the more excited and apprehensive to go and explore my work the next morning in the light of day!