Andrew Curtis
The ‘British Invasion’ of 1964-66 saw musical acts like The Beatles, influenced by American rock ‘n’ roll and blues music. They reprocessed and reintegrated these forms into the cultural landscape their inspiration had come from, creating new associations and meaning from an existing presence.
New Empire (Castle Scene) depicts a pair of downed Monkey Puzzle trees outside a house in Kent on the 16th October 1987. The Monkey Puzzle tree takes 150 years to reach full maturity. Because of this it is referred to as a fossil with iconic status. The key to the connection of these iconic trees to this project is the two fallen icons that resonate throughout Stuart’s story and which the trees symbolise – Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon.
Whilst making this work for In Conversation with Stuart Sutcliffe I could only find monochromatic portraits of Stuart but panchromatic photographs of his paintings through Internet searches. One in particular, Untitled, Rural Scene with Tree, informed the choices I made for Castle Scene. The press image of the fallen trees that I appropriated for this work was taken in the era of widely available colour photography but printed in black and white photomechanical halftone.
Castel Scene is a screen print using a pigment made from finely ground Whitby Jet, a fossil of Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria Araucana). The cultural importance of the fossil and the organism from which it derived symbolises both mourning and celebrated colonialism. Two lost icons appear in this work, forever immortalised through the black and white photomechanical halftone in which they are received through contemporary technological searches.