Coffin Works Exhibition : Artist: Ian Andrews

I propose to examine the concept of death through the activities that we are predominantly engaged in during our lives.

Whilst I find the idea of apparitions that can move freely through our space difficult to accept, I find it easy to believe that the constant repetition of activities in a certain place leave behind vibrations of some description that can manifest themselves visually under certain conditions, particularly when those activities are curtailed suddenly as seems to have been the case at the Newman factory.

The workers involved in the manufacture of the coffin furniture were making items by hand, casting, polishing, stamping, staining and working with cloth for the shrouds, for the majority of their lives. Many devoted their lives to the company working past eighty years of age. Does this amount of continual, dedicated labour completely cease when we die or do we leave traces of the movements of our habitual activities in the spiritual realm?

I want to make a piece which expresses solidarity with the workers from the factory but which explores my own dedicated activity, the continual scratching of the charcoal on the paper, the continual caresses of the brush on the canvas.

What activities would symbolise an artist's life? Despite the wide range of processes and approaches that make up contemporary art practice, surely the “brushstroke” is the ultimate symbol of the “artist at work” and relates back to the workers at the factory who were making things by hand rather than mass production.

Therefore I propose to create work that shows the artist at work on the “other side”, having passed over, a ghostly presence making marks and brushstrokes in a desperate attempt to continue to communicate!

The most appropriate medium to explore these ghostly mark- making activities is surely film, when projected it disappears in strong light like the apparition and it's looped potential for repeat perfectly expresses the spiritual manifestations that are often repeated sequences of movement in the same locations.

I plan to explore these manifestations of spiritual mark- making by filming from the reverse side of various forms of material, involving projection of the finished film onto cloth, relating back to the shrouds that were made in the factory available in a range of colours and designs as appropriate to the deceased.