ilka

The inspiration for my work came from The Beatles, specifically the song ‘Yesterday’. The title ‘Yesterday’ captured my imagination and got me thinking about everything that encapsulates yesterday. What format is better for referencing yesterdays than newspapers? So I decided to choose 7 newspapers - one for everyday of the week - for the entire 2011. 

 

My fascination with language and synaesthesia - I associate letters of the alphabet, days of week, months of year etc with specific colours - allowed the idea to grow. This work writes a sentence from the song ‘Yesterday’. The size and colour of the canvasses and their images was determined by the sentence: “Yesterday came suddenly”, a ‘Y’ for example is green and would be a rectangular shape, as opposed to an ‘A’ which is red and more square shaped. In the background of each canvas is a digital print of all the ‘important’ events in history that occurred on that particular day.

 

On the whole the work is about the inconsequentiality of life, how even the most important events get swallowed up in the humdrum of everyday life. If enough time is allowed to pass, very few remember what precisely happened on that day in history. I used translucency and layers in my painting technique to enhance the ephemeral quality of the work and to create fractured images. It’s only a suggestion of an image, because it is memory based.

 

The work consists of 23 canvasses, 21 of these are oil on canvas. With the images determined by the front page photograph for that specific day, the date is the title of the piece. The other two canvasses are mixed media works with images relating to making and eating breakfast, specifically scrambled eggs. This serves a double purpose, it relates back to the original inspiration for the song ‘Yesterday’ (a bit of an ‘in-joke’ for Beatles fans) as well as commenting on the fact that newspapers are read in the morning and then forgotten by the next.

 

I also created a new media work in which I translated the song ‘Yesterday’ letter by letter into blocks of colour, similar to ‘Reading Coulour’, as well as  84 ink on paper drawings. The drawings show more events of 2011, but also work as a key to understanding the installation/exhibition. If looked at carefully there are certain images like the 3rd of February which are represented as a drawing and a painting. This helps the viewer to understand that each painting is an image from a newspaper and since the paintings are titled according to the date it becomes understandable.

 

The drawings are divided into sets of seven - seven representing a week - showing the newspapers I chose to represent each day of the week. Each set is coloured differently, each week representing a month of the year and the colour representing my personal synaesthetic colour association with each of the months. For example January for me is red, so there are seven red drawings next to each other. The next row would be green, for February and every row begins with the Daily Telegraph and follows as shown below.

 

The Newspapers:

 

Monday: Daily Telegarph (UK)

Tuesday: Calcutta Post (India)

Wednesday: New York Times (USA)

Thursday: South China Morning Post (China)

Friday: Le Monde (France)

Saturday: Al-Ahram (Egypt)

Sunday: Sunday Times (South Africa) 

 

 

This exhibition entitled ‘Yesterday’ shares many similarities with my previous work, ‘Reading Colour’. Both explore art as text, and both have many different layers involving syneasthesia as well as language. The main difference between the two for me is that where the previous concept focused on freedom of expression, ‘Yesterday’s’ concept focuses on past events and how quickly they are forgotten, because, as Mr. Hunter Davies so aptly put it in his authorized biography of ‘The Beatles’: “Today, it all sounds like fiction, yet it was only yesterday.”