Scott Elk
Desire Lines - Wild Company, 2022.
Various recycled screenprinted and embroidered panels with thread on black linen
50cm x 70cm

This series of artworks was a real game changer for me. I had just seen the Matisse exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia, which featured many paper elements that the artist moved around playing with composition. I loved the idea of using the colour and pattern from my various collected fabric scraps, and arranging them as the starting points for new artworks.

This ticked a few boxes for me as it featured screen printed pieces as most of the fabrics are ones I have printed, as well as sentimental fabric from favourite shirts that have died over the years. It incorporates the use of text as a visual element, which has been a major part of my art practise over the years.

The overall project consisted of ten compositions on fabric, eight black, and finishing with two white. I made one a day, considering what parts worked and didn't work, before moving on to the next. The first six were pretty wild and filled me with so much excitement. I guess it was the satisfaction of wanting to do something in this medium for so long, and then actually seeing it physically front of me, as well as seeing how the contrast of the black fabric and the different elements jumped out. It was like breaking open a whole universe of ideas. For the next two, I wanted to reign it back in, and do a male/female pairing, with some more clearly defined figures, making a smaller circle at the top as a head, and a broad torso of wrapping parts. For the final two I wanted to continue this pair aspect with a white background, but abstract it further, thinking about them less as human figures, and more objects I could make in ceramic.

At the end of this process, three of the panels were then reconfigured into a new composition starting a new stitched narrative with the different elements playing vertically down a wall, while others were left as single panels, or paired.

Desire Lines

The majority of work produced in 2022 falls into my Desire Lines series of paintings, drawings, screenprints, and ceramics. The series is about relationship to place, connection to people, and the sometimes intoxicating, head-fucking connection of physical interaction.

A desire line, is a term often referred to in urban or transportation planning, as a path created as a consequence of human traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. It is the way taken by choice, by desire, and by necessity when following the heart. It is movement with intention.

In a real world practical application, the desire lines have the possibility to connect people resulting in events along a time line. I see people as these spinning vortexes of energy, in a positive sense like galaxies spinning and reaching out, and in contrast, negatively sucking everything towards themselves like black holes spinning. When two of these things collide, wondrous and unexpected things can happen; colours swirl, planets could be flung out of orbit, or set in a new orbit, momentarily or until the end of time. My interpretation of these desire lines is constantly searching to insert the human element of connection into fragmented, and abstracted forms.