Richard Hawkins Curious Yellow 1995

Included in Paperwork: A Brief History of Artists’ Scrapbooks at the ICA, London in 2014 (see: https://archive.ica.art/whats-on/paperwork-brief-history-artists-scrapbooks), Richard Hawkins’ Curious Yellow could be seen, among much else, to represent a compression of the scrapbook-production process.  Here are selected raw materials, some of which have been demonstrably stuck to a ground (the sticky tape shows), while others are stacked up as if awaiting a suitable base.  Nevertheless: the whole arrangement is very carefully composed, and we might be forgiven for thinking that were this ever to have been hidden between covers, this would be the artist’s favourite spread.  Curious Yellow is curiously at once a scrapbook and not a scrapbook.  Materially, it belongs with Hannah Höchs Album in its use of mass-media, printed imagery, while making a feature of the means of joining surfaces to together, which the latter conceals.