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Found Paintings
The Found Paintings project evolved out of Ben Cook’s studio practice in Manchester Artists Studio Association (1993 – 2003). He developed a process of culling material from his immediate environment, (that of the last vestiges of Manchester’s once great textile industry), and relating it to his abstract painting practice and his interest in popular culture. The Found Paintings project is made up of four main bodies of work embracing a variety of media and with inter-related themes:
Football Found Paintings 1999
The Football Found Paintings developed out of Cook using textiles to paint on in place of traditional canvas. He began to discover off-cuts of flawed and faulted fabrics, (in this case designs for football shirts), that could be stretched up as abstract paintings without the addition of paint. The marks caused by manufacturing mistakes in production were edited and selected by Cook to be reappropriated as perfect examples of his earlier painting practice. Once selected and re-presented, they are transformed from manufacturing rejects to ‘edified works of art’ in their new form of Found Paintings.
Found Paintings 2001
Cook’s second series of Found Paintings referenced the aesthetics, history and mythology of Abstract Expressionism in relation to contemporary discourses on painting. These works, made from textiles originally destined for the soft furnishings industry, appeared to emulate the period of American painting when new types of acrylic paint were being poured, dripped and scraped by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. The veils of rich colours, interrupted by marks made seemingly by the human hand, were in fact produced by computer-generated mistakes in manufacture in a Manchester textiles factory.
Diffusion Line products
Cook’s approach to painting as an expanded practice has enabled his work to develop in a number of diverse ways. He has created a Diffusion Line of Found Paintings products, which reference the phenomena of contemporary art being adopted into the mainstream as a ‘lifestyle choice’. The limited edition objects and items of memorabilia include bagged Football paintings, silk scarves, wallpaper, bespoke shirts and skateboard decks – all branded with a Ben Cook Found Paintings logo.
Digital textile Paintings
The digital textile paintings explored the commercial manufacturing process of digital printing onto textiles. Cook made gestural paintings of architectural details that were scanned into the computer system at Belford Prints in Macclesfield. Using textile design software, the images were repeated to make a textile pattern. One area was selected, cropped and blown up to a very large scale. By using this process Cook was ‘finding’ abstract compositions which were initially read as paintings but on closer inspection were revealed to be repeat textiles, thus blurring the definitions of craft and fine art.
