Steve Lovett and I have been friends for a long time,
and from the first time I visited Steve's home workshop I was green with envy!
Attached to his house, on the suburban border of Ponsonby,
the studio space had a previous life as a local dairy.
With an amazing library on one wall, and a blank gallery wall for displaying on the other side,
plenty of space and natural light, I honestly think his studio is bigger than my whole apartment!!!
Attached to his house, on the suburban border of Ponsonby,
the studio space had a previous life as a local dairy.
With an amazing library on one wall, and a blank gallery wall for displaying on the other side,
plenty of space and natural light, I honestly think his studio is bigger than my whole apartment!!!
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| Steve Lovett's print studio at home |
"The studio is the place where I work almost everyday.
Its a bit of tip at the moment because I have several projects on the go,
so I sort of wade through the chaos to the various work stations to progress the projects.
The studio is a laboratory, a physical space where meaning is made and remade,
broken up, reconfigured, discarded and retrieved and then sent out again into the world.
This current body of work is made up from the collections of photographs and printed ephemera
that I have inherited and that I been trawling from markets & junk shops for over 3 decades.
More recently these images have come from online sources.
My interest pre-digital era ‘vernacular’ photography has been augmented
by abandoned family photo albums and product photography.
Here, this ‘vernacular’ becomes a strategy to refer to a locus of expression
within photographic image making that is everywhere, nowhere and anywhere simultaneously.
The activity of collecting images discarded by other people
has developed as a response to the overabundance of images in print and online.
The image hoarding has developed focus in an ongoing project, ‘Some people who may (not) here’.
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| Steve Lovett, Some people who may (not) here, 2014 Screenprinted concertina book |
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| Steve Lovett working model in progress for the 2014 Sketchbook Project |
to reconstruct a new image - fictionalised response to missing information in the found images.
Over the summer and into next year this work will result in exhibiting 100 of these images,
along with several book and some new larger screen printed works.
This work can be seen at http://stevepepper1.tumblr.com/
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| Wash-out area in Steve Lovett's studio |
Except, for this bit of my process, I need to make something everyday.
I tend to process ideas through making.
Different projects require different strategies, materials, tools.
But what I do around making is a lot of looking and reading about print,
about anything that can help with the generation of work."
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