Overview:
The 'Raft Paintings' employ one of the most ubiquitous and abject materials of modern life – the plastic bin bag – to connect with both the history of art and contemporary ecological concerns. In these works, Quinn's paradoxical articulation of a single, associative material draws attention to numerous far-reaching themes, an artistic gesture that, perhaps surprisingly, will last longer than any type of paint. The 'Raft Paintings' consist of multiple bin bags, some stuffed with non-biodegradable material, others ripped or left untouched and collaged to a canvas ground. Using bags of a single colour, mostly the ubiquitous black, or several different Pop-like colours, they are arranged in undulating folds on the picture surface, existing in both the flat two-dimensions of painting as well as the three-dimensions of sculptural relief. Made on the floor, Quinn adapts certain details such as industrially stamped perforations or frilled, ripped edges into the composition and just as a painter might choose between the different qualities and tones of paint, manipulates their surprising variations in colour, thickness, shine and quality to create a voluptuous surface texture. While formally referencing modernist painting, Arte Povera sculpture or classical statuary, the raft paintings also point to more psychological and environmental themes. While much of the world's oceans are blighted by plastic waste, non-biodegradable bin bags are still used, a constant symbol of our everyday lives whose contents remain hidden from view. In this way, while reminding us of our perilous ecological future, read in more psychological terms Quinn's ripped and stuffed bin bags could suggest un-mined territory; a potent symbol of the 'collective unconscious'.
