work / SCHOOL DESK PROJECT 2006

School Desk Project 2006

biro and pencil on laminex on chipboard

12 panels 33cm x 33cm each

At The Brotherhood of Saint Laurence near my studio in Brunswick around the end of 2004 I came across a group of school desks that were about to be destroyed and thrown in to the skip because of their deteriorated condition. I bought all 18 of them for the bargain price of $5 as they were seen as little more than garbage. I spent the afternoon at the Brotherhood dismantling them, removing the desk tops from their rusted frames. The tops were covered in doodles, drawings and text in both pencil and coloured biro. Interestingly, this is not what originally attracted me to them. It was the used chewing gum stuck beneath each table top. Layers and layers of the stuff, semi fossilised in faded greens, blues and whites, some still with teeth marks in them. When I got the desk tops back to the studio I carefully chipped off the hardened 'chewy' from the underside of the tops and collected them in a zip-loc bag for a possible future work. It was during this process that I became interested in the markings on the tops themselves. Each top usually had one heavily worked section of graffiti which had been worked and reworked. It appeared that the cleaners in this High School or College could never completely erase the marks from the laminex creating a complex layer of ghost imagery… a social history of teenage doodlings. The work consists of 12 panels - the most interesting sections, carefully cut, collated and arranged into my format, 33cm x 33cm each.

Among the drawings of Guitars, Heavy Metal Bands, Robots, Eyes, Faces, DJ Turntables etc, some of my favourite bits include the lines; ’20 pages to go’, ‘BEER’, ‘SPAWN of EVIL’, ‘Creation of Good’, ‘Tina is a Slut’, ‘Kill Hippies’,‘I WIPE MY OWN ARSE’ and the detailed lyrics below -

And the big wheels

keep on turning

neon burning

up above

and she’s high on this world

come on and take

a long ride with me girl

on the tunnel of love

Dire Straits ‘Tunnel of Love’

I died so many years ago

But you can make me feel

Like it isn’t so