Tailgate Picnic

Tailgate picnics, we're told, are those picnics enjoyed while convening near the open tailgate of a vehicle, typically a utility, station wagon, hatchback or similar, and which commonly occur around the parking areas of ovals, sports grounds, stadiums, and by the roadside or beachside ... just about anywhere you can stop a vehicle and have enough space to 'do your thing'. Impromptu in style, they're casual occasions that don't court much in the way of pomp and circumstance. While the •Tailgate Picnic• work here is a carefully composed affair, the spirit of 'tailgating' is wholeheartedly embraced, in part via the device of one rather large tail-end shape parked centre stage. Using an abstracted pictorial vocabulary, •Tailagte Picnic• looks at 'bodies' from a generic standpoint ... be they car bodies, human bodies, or otherwise ... and seeks to highlight some of their commonalities, including the notions (and potions) of 'consumption' and 'discharge' that can be seen as shared traits among them.

Utilising wood sourced in Japan, the central, roughly ovoid shape was printed from prepared Japanese cedar (sugi • 杉) log-ends ('maruta • 丸太). The complementary components were printed from various ply & veneer woods, cut and shaped to meet the compositional layout. All printing was done by hand using a hand-held 'baren', without the aid of a printing press.

Size

38cm x 57cm

Prints

3

Technique

Xylography