His Sky, My Sky and A Cardboard Box
Boxes in My Back Yard (ongoing), cardboard boxes covered in inkjet prints of John Constable’s Clouds Studies from 1821 and 1822
I spent two years in the late 2000s living in Glasgow, Scotland where noting the nuances of the Glaswegian sky was a daily ritual for most. To stay a step ahead of the weather meant you "got" the city. The local sky was the place, and the place was the sky, and this symbiosis foregrounded my thinking in "His Sky, My Sky, and a Cardboard Box". This project was inspired by my time in Glasgow, but it references another artist's work: the English Romantic painter John Constable who made close to 50 studies of the Suffolk sky between 1821-22. Like the Glaswegians, Constable saw the local sky as specific to the landscape. But unlike the Glaswegians, he thought of the local as emblematic of the national: for John Constable the Suffolk sky was the English sky.
In this project, I wonder about how the local identity of place is connected to constructs of the national. My subject for these paintings became a series of cardboard boxes, which I covered in printed reproductions of Constable's skies. By folding the seams, the architecture of the box distorted the image, representing the sky more like a map rather than a romantic ephemera. In painting my version of his skies, I looked for ways to disassociate the historical narrative by imagining the incongruity of a sky with borders.
