Solar Flare Family Symphony

Screen print on paper, edition of 3 + 1 AP

Individual Plate sizes: 30 x 20 cm, 20 x 15 cm, 10 x 10cm

Laser-etched copper, brass and stainless steel

2015

​

Solar Flare Family Symphony is a series of almost 80 separate pieces, made of brass, copper or stainless steel, with drawings laser etched onto their surface. The drawings were extracted and digitised from found industrial and mechanical materials. 

 

The resulting drawings have a sign-like quality due to the isolation and their central placement on a metal substrate. As the work progressed, other associations began to appear: there were architectural and biomorphic impressions appearing within the shapes, and some that were more diagrammatic, like an occulted notation system.

 

‘Solar Flare’ was an aesthetic association not only related to the natural lustre of the brass, copper and stainless steel, but also to how the metal behaved when subjected to the heat of the laser during the process of etching. Highly conductive copper needed a lot of heat from the laser to bind the glaze to the metal, leaving the plates discoloured and tarnished, with streaks of red and iridescent pink running through the usual orange-brown. 

 

To describe the work as a ‘family symphony’ correlates it to a group of linked yet diverse individual notes, co-existing in a supportive ecosystem. A symphony exists only as the sum of its many parts - just as there are solo performers, there also needs to be background players, percussionists, bass and tinkling bells to create the final piece.

​

​