Peter Green, I938 Isle of Wight
Additional Papers 1984-88 (1989)
Between 1982 and 1984 as part of Green’s job at Bath Academy of Art, he sat on dozens of committees set up to achieve a major reorganisation of the academy. At the end of this period faced with a pile of committee papers a metre high, rather than throw them away, he thought he should make something out of them – roll, stack, or cut them up and make some sort of sculpture object. But he realised there were a lot of drawings amongst them, done without thinking, during those hundreds of hours of meetings. He freed the drawings – as he had been freed from the committees, by blotting out the writing.
He stapled each drawing to a bundle of papers so that when he painted on them they would be reasonably stable, and they began to organise themselves around the idea of a book – or as it turned out a parody of a book, with shadowy ‘characters’, rabbit, elephant, pig-dog-banana, pencil, appearing from drawing to drawing. They settled comfortably into an arched structure; white, calm linear to start with, then through a substantial coloured middle section, to a dark, agitated, even violent end. Ghost plots and sub-plots appeared from the sequence of the drawings. “It was good to get something positive from those awful committees.” Edition 30/30. 32.0 x 29.0 cm. Bound in office ring binder.?Published by ISIS VOICE, Music Productions and Editions, Bern and Marlene Frei Artist-Books, Galerie & Edition, Zürich, Switzerland.