Zinc Squares

 While my laptop was away for repairs and my blog was quiet, I was working on another piece for a SAQA Exhibition.  Over the next couple of days I will share some of my studio photos from the piece I made for the SAQA exhibition called Radical Elements.  For this exhibition, the selected artists were given a year to create a 22 x 36" vertically oriented piece relating to an assigned element from the periodic table.  The element I was assigned was ZINC.  I have been playing around with various ideas over the past year and some of those experiments have made their appearance on this blog.  But the work was due by late September and I had to get serious .......

 I bought this 3" x 50 ft. roll of 99.9% pure zinc almost a year ago.  I played around with it a bit, but finally settled on doing something quilt like that made sense to me.  It just did not feel right to be entirely altering the way I work as an artist.  I am a printer and I work with fabric.  The curator was asking us to try to avoid using fabric, but I just could not figure out how to create something that would meet the criteria for shipping and hanging without using at least a bit of fabric and thread.

I decided to work with a grid, so I cut the zinc into 3" square pieces.....it felt good (but also sort of scary) to cut all these pieces from my precious roll of pure zinc.  There would be no turning back now.....I would not have enough zinc left over to change my course after this.