Telephone Drawing
- Artist:
- Type: Print
- Medium: Screenprint
- Production Date: 2020
- Copy Number: 3
- Edition: 30
- Description: This print was created by Martin Boyce and produced in DCA Print Studio as part of 2020 Editions: a portfolio of prints created to mark an extraordinary, challenging year, and to support DCA's recovery from a crisis that has gripped the entire cultural sector.
"Some time ago I came across an image of an old wall mounted phone. It was simultaneously familiar and distant, like an object in a fictional setting, one step removed from reality. There was something cinematic about this image which carried with it a silent sense of expectation and potential. I imagined being alone in an empty lobby and the phone ringing. What narrative would unfold if I lifted that receiver‘ From there I began to think of the telephone and its relationship to location and how a phone call would once have been a way to connect two fixed points in space and time. Two phones in two different rooms in two distant cities, a technological device as a portal, the direct intimacy of words spoken into a listening ear.
For my exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich I have made a series of painted panels with sculptural phones attached. The panels take the form of overpainted sections of wall complete with decorative moulding. The phones have been specially designed using shapes and angles from two graphic patterns that have appeared throughout my work over the years. Echoes of the Martel concrete trees can be found in the receiver while the main body of the phone uses a diagonal grid pattern from as far back as 1996. This grid was developed as a graphic motif for the idea of the city. The facade of a glass tower or the footprint of the modern city.
The screenprint for DCA shows one of the development drawings for the phone. Here you can see the grid present in the buttons but the additional diagonal lines drawn over the body show my thought process as I explore the possibility of shifting the shape of the phone to mirror the buttons. The finished phones, which were produced through a combination of CNC milling and silicon moulded resin casting, take on this rhomboid shape. For the print I overlaid the phone number of DCA, deliberately misaligning the numbers to produce a sense of memory or recall and the movement of fingers over the buttons."
Martin Boyce - Dimensions: Framed: 51cm (H) x 38cm (W)
Unframed: 41cm (H) x 29.5cm (W) - Acquisition Note: Purchase fully funded by NFA
- Digital Copy:A digital copy exists.
- Location: Store - Bay 1 - Small works shelf
- Accession Number: 2021.5
- Contact: University of Stirling Art Collection
