Drawing with Tape: Part two

Colour coded electrical tape

I was interested to hear this week that an artist in Sheffield who is working with LEDs has had some research done on how to give the strings of LEDs in her work more resilience as the work has to be publicly sited. The answer was to embed the LEDS in a heat shrinking transparent electrical tape. Tape seems to be going through a technical revolution, some of its more industrial uses now looking to replace older methods such as welding and riveting, thus making much cleaner finishes and in many cases a much better waterproof bond. 

I have put up a post on drawing with tape before, but that was a few years ago and its use is perhaps even more popular as a drawing medium, so it is perhaps timely to remind you of how useful it can be, as well as how powerful and very particular the aesthetic language of tape drawing can be. 

Mark Khaisman

I've been working with brown translucent packaging tape myself recently and it is a very sensitive medium if you want to control tonal variation. It has other benefits too, such as if you cut it neatly into rectangles, eventually all the small pieces of tape begin to create a grid like structure that gives stability to images that could be rather formless.  Mark Khaisman's tape drawings are a useful indicator of the types of possible surfaces you can achieve and it is also useful to follow his career and look at how he has progressed his work from an aesthetic dependent on tape, to one now using more sculptural conventions. 

Aakash Nihalani

Aakash Nihalani uses tape to create optical illusions and in particular he makes use of tape's easy to use and remove quality. His work reminds me of Felice Varini and Georges Rousse; artists I looked at when discussing illusion. 

Joy Walker has used tape to create tightly controlled rhythmic geometric structures. Walker is an artist living and working in Toronto. Her work reflects her interest in pattern, repetition, geometry and the ephemeral, using a variety of methods including printing, photography, drawing, stitching and cutting. In the image below you see her attaching a small, very informal tape drawing to a wall. Her approach to using tape is to reveal its delicate, more sensual properties. 

Joy Walker

Maurizio Cattelan: Comedian 2019

Probably the most sensational recent use of tape was by Maurizio Cattelan. His banana taped to a wall, 'Comedian', provoked debate and discussion among audiences around the world. Cattelan's work initially thought of as a witty stunt, then as a self portrait, eventually morphed into an unlikely symbol of a labour movement, initiated a discussion about art and financial securities, as well as becoming a symbol for the end of conceptual art. All this with a banana and some duct tape.  ArtNet news has collected articles about the debate and made them available here.

Perhaps the Guerrilla Girls had the most succinct repost.

Guerrilla Girls: 2019

Find below a few more tapes that can be bought on line. The fact that tape can be thought of as very long drawings means that certain types of associations gravitate around this common commercial product, from miniature roads to playful games about measurement. The idea I really like, which is the screw head tape; a tape designed to stick two surfaces together but to make the join look as if it was a screw fixed joint, is a simple illusion, but in its very uselessness it becomes poetic. The same designers (Richard Shed and Sam Johnson) came up with Dovetail tape which is conceptually witty but not quite as poetic. 

Centre Tape

Tape measure tape

Screw head tape

Dovetail tape

It's not just designers that have used tape in interesting ways, the architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, has had to use tape to draw with because of trying to make drawings in a very wet climate.

Studio Mumbai: Saat Rasta: Mahindra Unit Tape drawing, 2013. Pencil and tape on wood

Bijoy Jain explains that tape drawing is for him about ‘adapting to place’. The idea of drawing with tape on a plywood sheet originating from a response to constant, heavy rainfall and the need to find an alternative to drawings printed on paper, which could not withstand the conditions on site. The tape drawing contains information about the fabrication and workings of the unit’s roof edge, building components, layering of materials, and their proportion. The contrast in colours and grain of both the tape and wood also lends a tactile quality to the drawn section. In this modest architectural drawing, practicality and visual expression are conjoined, as line is activated by the seams between each piece of tape, in such a way that it suggests the material properties of the final building materials. Bijoy Jain goes on to state that the Saatrasta-Mahindra tape drawing also conveys a narrative of place and process and that building design needs to be rooted in a context that also includes the way in which architects design and draw.

Bijoy Jain has this to say about his design process; 'The way I practice, architecture works both on a personal as well as universal level. If we think that what fundamentally makes me, also fundamentally makes everyone else, then it means that we are all deeply connected'. 

Tape as a connecting material is something that is not too far away from the material that wrapped mummies in ancient Egypt, and of course before we forget, was also the stuff that Maurizio Cattelan used for his piece, 'A Perfect Day', the 1999 work in which he duct-taped his gallerist Massimo De Carlo to a wall.

'A Perfect Day'

See also: 

Drawing with tape part one

Michael Craig-Martin creates a line drawing using tape