
Surface Texture – David Noonan’s pieces – seen in Tate St Ives and last year.
Each piece is screen printed onto fabric, creating texture and a sense of layering this is the ‘finish’ to works that use layers as part of the process. So the images are selected from old film stills, photographs, from books or other vintage sources. These are collaged and then re-photographed, re-collaged before the print process. The result is like a flickering film, almost a capture of a film image projected. The fabric (Noonan uses Jute, then stretched over wood) used in the print is perhaps the final ‘screen’. The fracturing and layering of images is the key here, Noonan’s intent is perhaps nostalgic, emphasised by black and white and sepia as key monochromes, it is also perhaps to do with memory and recalled experience (Do we dream in black and white?). The images seem to belong to a surrealist tradition, possibly in the most fundamental way – Andre Breton recognised photography as potentially the most surreal of the visual arts media.

These are issues I will need to deal with in editing the final installation. The decision to use black and white as the dominate opposite, the negative/positive divide, could be relaxed with colour, reducing or balancing the implied ‘nostalgia’ of black and white film captures. Fabric as screen in all its senses of the word is crucial to the final work. Screen – to close off, Screen – for projection. How that fabric keeps its texture and printed image as well as receives prove ion will be crucial

