Cherry is an artist who works with vinyl,she did her B A in interactive arts and her M A in fine art . Cherry came into college to talk to us about her craft and what she produces.She was a sign maker for 7 years producing traffic signs, health and safety signs ,bespoke signs and the company she worked for had the contracts for producing all the NHS and Job Centre plus signs.Cherry then worked in galleries for 2 years which is where she began to think about using vinyl in her own art work.Tenneson Dale is a collaboration of work by Cherry and her friend Nicola they both wanted to create art using vinyl because of its flat appearance and clean lines.They were interested in Minimalism and looked at the work of Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Karl Andre to inspire them. The use of colour was key in the work and having decided to use politics as the theme of their work the three main political party colours were chosen. Colour- Order-Politics this was the plan for the collection of work , to represent political information using coloured vinyl in a minimal style. One of the pieces was displayed at the Corner House in Manchester , it is called Order Order (2006) and is the alphabet of political seats and consists of 26 separate canvases with vinyl in blue,red and yellow to represent the 3 main parties.For some reason the Corner House only displayed 16 of the canvases so when the exhibition moved on to its next venue at Stockport art gallery Tenneson and Dale added large red crosses to the 10 canvases that had not been previously shown.
Cherry gave us a demo of how to weed vinyl letters off tape and also how to layer vinyls, i asked her about hand drawing directly onto vinyl rather than using illustrator on the computer and she said that drawing onto vinyl and cutting it by hand with a scalpel was the best way to get intricate detail as the vinyl cutting machine had limitations with scale and lines. It would take a while to develop enough skill to cut vinyl confidently but Cherry mentioned some artist who do it by hand as well as by machine,Julian Opie ,Jim Lamby ,Ian Monroe and Andrew Bracey. Cherry gave us lots of tips and advice, i asked her about the best way to place vinyl onto perspex which is with water and a tiny amount of washing up liquid in a spray bottle!She also adviced us not to let vinyl get too warm because heat warps it and to remove any glue with white spirit once the vinyl is in place. Cherry was very inspiring and it was great to meet her.
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