My urban scavenging and accumulation
Field work
I collect to bring or gather together, I systematically seek and acquire items of a particular kind of thing to take away and store
I create art work that is made from these pieces that I collect from the road side [on journeys to work or whenever I walk, any where]. I have long pursued this working pattern of using material in my work that I scavenge from the gutter and which have had a previous use, been discarded or lost, are degraded or broken, collecting and accumulating, using and recycling these elements of contempory culture and challenging myself to bring the parts together in a new form. By using found objects in my work I stress the need to examine what we take to be unaesthetic.
To bring the detritus of conspicuous consumption centrally into my art practice, rearranging, re-classifying and transforming it, I strive to build a tension between the reading of a single fragment and the reading of the whole work.
I view my collecting, reuse and rearranging of found objects as a form of bricolage and a type of social history, urban archaeology, fieldwork and anthropology.
The artwork I produce from this collection (whether it is 50 foot long printed friezes adapted to the contour of an exhibition space, colourful silhouettes projected on to walls and ceilings, or animal and totem sculptural assemblages), has at it core the need to explore these objects and their potential so that the creative process of producing the artwork, takes a form in which my sense of curiosity is given free play to engage on the basis of unpremeditated chance encounters with a rapid and roving way of looking, the vernacular glance.
Elevating the objects I find discarded by the roadside into symbols and messages from the unheroic side of contempory culture.
Jacob Rock 2009.

Sculpture and Assemblages

Projections and Installations

projection

'Letting Fearsome Things Fly' installation Birmingham