Carrying on with pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I took hold of the squares of vinyl I have been carving at random and started hacking away at the edges. I suppose like so many people I’ve been conditioned to think of two-dimensional art as something sitting neatly within a clearly defined square or rectangular border. I think this is particularly pronounced in printmaking, where metal plates and wood, lino, vinyl blocks come ready cut with nice straight edges. The tyranny of the border. So I took a hefty pair of scissors to them. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, it seemed unnatural to destroy those neat borders and also to do it at random, letting the cuts be guided by the way the scissors pulled against the vinyl, rather than directing the cuts according to some predetermined design, in the spirit of the 20th century Surrealist artists who deliberately tried to generate imagery through accident.
