In my studio the rags pile up: old t-shirts, towels, and bed sheets, put to work wiping brushes and carrying paint away. Over the years the paint has stiffened them and almost fused the pile together; often they have to be pulled apart. These photographs look closely at what that use has left behind, the colour caught in folds and the years of work hardened into the fibres.
The Cloth Project
Against Erasure
The rags in my studio are old t-shirts, towels, and bed sheets: cloth that once touched skin, dried bodies, covered beds. In the shed they take on another life. They wipe, absorb, clean, carry away. Oil and pigment stiffen their fibres; colour gathers in folds; gestures harden into crusts and ridges. They pile up on top of each other until the paint almost fuses them, and they often have to be pulled apart. What was once soft and forgettable becomes dense: a mass that insists on being seen.
They are unintended archives. They hold the traces of maintenance, correction, and care, the acts that make painting possible but rarely enter its image: the drag of a brush wiped clean, the residue of decisions undone, colours that once belonged elsewhere. They were never artworks, but they carry the memory of work.
There is an irony at the centre of this project that should not be avoided. Photographed at close range, the rags are often beautiful. Colour pools in folds; pigment crusts catch light; fibres matted by repeated use begin to resemble brushwork. The cloth that absorbed and erased paint comes, through the camera's attention, to look like a painting. What was expendable starts to resemble what was valued. And that beauty has a cost: visual pleasure can be a form of anaesthesia, holding the viewer at a remove from what the rag actually is, a discarded tool destined to be thrown away. To acknowledge this is not to apologise for it. The beauty is real, and it is what makes the images worth looking at long enough for other questions to surface.
The photographs are taken on my phone, mid-session, between one gesture and the next, with nothing staged. The phone brings its own irony: its processing quietly enhances what it records, adjusting light and colour toward the beautiful. Part of the aestheticisation is mine; part of it belongs to the machine.
Each image shows a surface, a fold, a crust of pigment, but never the whole. The rag's weight, its smell, how it would feel stiffened in the hand: none of this passes through the photograph. The image is a window that is also a wall. Yet that partiality is generative. Because the rag is never shown whole, the mind reaches for what is missing, wondering where it is kept, what it weighs, how many sessions of work are compressed into its fibres.
A rag mid-session is invisible, absorbed into the rhythm of work. Photographed, it becomes a subject. The disposable object, never meant to be seen, comes to exist, fully and stubbornly, in the imagination of someone who will only ever know it as an image.