The brief for this picture was to explore an alternative way of summarising the experience of visiting the Edinburgh Festival, using the advertising posters and flyers with which the city is awash every August. I hit upon the idea of spelling out an interior message or story hidden within the assemblage, and what emerged was a narrative about a doomed festival affair. Don't ask me about my state of mind at the time, it was just the most obvious dialogue that presented itself while I was sorting through the piles of paper I amassed in the first week of the fringe. What also caught my eye was the number of pairs of posters which had similiar designs or themes. So I collected them together and positioned them across the final artwork, so that the pairs mirrored each other with as much space between the nominated squares as possible. The intention of the piece is to provoke thought about the process of attaching associations to what are essentially very disparate pieces of advertising, and on a more prosaic level, instigate a game of trying to pick out the matching pairs given a few clues......
Edinburgh Festival: Pairs and Affairs (2008)
printed material on mounting board (350 x 470 mm)
some of the squares which explain the basic narrative....
and a few of the pairs....
