ilka

The route or journey that inspired my work and formed the backbone of my concept was the route of the creative experience. How one artist influences another, be they in the same field or not. My artworks title is therefore “The Route to Creativity”.

After reading Patti Smith’s autobiography entitled “Just Kids”, in which she tells the story of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer and how they influenced and helped each other to become artists in their own way, I was inspired to create my own artwork.

​

In the work I drill holes into a piece of wood, in the shape of a portrait of Robert on the one side and Patti on the other. Behind the wood are lights which shine through the holes creating a luminescence, a metaphor for the artistic influences that they had. In front of the wood is a layer of glass. On the glass coloured blocks are printed. Each coloured block represents a letter of the alphabet, since I have something called grapheme synaesthesia where I associate letters of the alphabet with colours.

Each ‘page’ has a poem of coloured blocks written on it. The poem in front of Robert was written by me after seeing one of his photographs of flowers in a gallery. The poem in front of Patti is entitled ‘little lost leaf’ and that poem was inspired by her song “Wild, Wild Leaves” which was written for Robert after he died.

​

Patti Smith was Robert Mapplethorpe’s muse and he was hers. The images I used for them are photographs, the one of Robert was taken by Patti and the one of Patti was taken by Robert. The wood I used for the work is Maple wood as a nod to the fact that they are both American and a play on Robert’s surname.

​

The key feeling of the work is that of translucency. Each artist is influenced by those who came before them. But the work each artist creates is uniquely their own. It’s an endless cycle like the cycle of Robert and Patti, who not only inspired each other, but inspired me and many others as well. The words of the poems I wrote don’t matter, the artistic expression of them and the creative journey which lead to that expression does.