rca secret — ART JOURNAL

rca-secret-postcards-369-cutout-collage-2015

trawling through some image folders, came across these photographs of the three postcards i made for rca secret 2015.i made the effort to photograph them at the time, and now i am wondering whatever happened to the postcards. my secret distraction.did they sell and raise some cash for my old college? i think maybe not, and they have since been resigned to the skip of art. the rca have previously stated few remain unsold after the exhibition [so there are some]. unsold cards are not returned to the artists.[three secret postcards 2015]thinking about my cards, wherever they may be: the first three are numerals [3, 6, 9] based on wooden printing blocks, although i flipped the original design. i was influenced by metal signage at the time.rca secret is all numbers: numbered cards on display, long queues, a secret raffle to select the first fifty buyers through the door, selling cards and raising a lot of money for student fees. then after the sale, matching names with numbers, or numbers to names. my postcard numbers [as discovered on the rca website]: 1724, 1875, 2098.the number three: everywhere, nearly every day: on a door, in tiny details in photographs, pondering on the red '33' painted on the backrest of my vintage swivel draughtsman's chair, which was rescued from a skip at the college where i used to work - as this seemed significant - and two threes made six, another red three, and that made nine… i was looking out for three numbers. 1-2-3 may have been a simpler combination, but there was something quite cheery about the rounded shape of the figure nine, and it looked like a lowercase little 'g'.the number 33 studio chair has since lost any sense of swivel, so maybe the college skip was the best place for it after all. nevertheless, it’s a moderately pleasing piece of vintage furniture, with black tubular steel legs and a curved, ergonomic wooden seat [with some surprising graffiti], and it's naturally in a design partnership with my parallel-motion drawing board [that i acquired for free in exchange for a small collage]. there is less need for this type of design studio equipment with computer-aided design, i guess. but i digress… it's just a 'high' chair [but chairs can be lethal, as i discovered while casually reading the times newspaper the other day][secret postcard to dubai]for the fourth postcard, for the rca's newest fund-raising venture, rca secret dubai, i reclaimed [re-used] the off-cut pieces from the number cards to make a new collaged piece with a more pronounced 3d appearance. the assembled curves and overlapping shapes also appeared to evoke a middle-eastern aesthetic.my secret postcard to dubai, where some millionaires reside, where the world’s most ambitious buildings are being constructed, where everything looks expensive, shiny, and new… and i was reconfiguring various cut-out scraps of already recycled card into a new mini-artwork for an international fund-raising art event in dubai. seems fair.rca secret: supporting the next generation of fine artists in their post-graduate studies.