[James]

Piece from tomorrow's Times about Amy's art. Also says she was awarded a first-class degree.

From The Times

June 14, 2008

Why old news is good news for artist who sliced up The Times


Amy Jackson with her piece made up of 579 copies of the Times

Lucy Bannerman

It is either art or an archivist's nightmare. Amy Jackson, an Oxford graduate, did not let the small matter of antiquity prevent her from slicing up hundreds of copies of The Times from 1876.

Jackson, 21, has pasted the fragments across a relative's kitchen cabinet as part of her degree show.

She spent three months cutting 27,237 holes out of a compendium that had been donated by a family friend. As a study in “pointless labour”, 472 were stitched back into the shredded volume, while the rest were used to decorate the walls, and even the microwave and toaster, of the kitchen in Leeds.

For another piece, she transformed nearly 600 copies of The Times from September 2006 to April 2008 into a 5ft brick chamber, called House. Each “brick” is made from one complete edition of The Times. Jackson has described this work as “a representation of time and memory. Each brick is like an abstract painting, with so much content and yet simplicity of form.” Others may call it a papier-mâché tower.

Either way, her tutors were impressed - Jackson is one of only three students this year to graduate with a first-class degree from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. She admits, however, that the reaction may not have been quite so generous among the social history professors.

Only fragments of the 1876 text remain in Jackson's work. One cutting captures details of the Prince of Wales on a tiger shoot during a royal visit to India. Others advertise boxes at the theatre, passages to Australia and “powerful geldings” for sale. “I found it easier to cut those pages up than the newspapers from last year. They have no relevance to me, whereas the others covered one of the most important periods of my life, my university years,” she said. “It's nice to make something new from newspapers as they always get thrown away in the end.”

Not all of them. Today The Times is presenting an online archive of 200 years of history, reproduced exactly as it appeared in the original pages. It will include every published issue of the newspaper from 1785 to 1985, featuring the reports of the Crimean War by William Howard Russell and letters to the Editor from Karl Marx.

Being fully digitised, it will also be resistant to the scissors of aspiring artists.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle4133464.ece

[dupin]

I went & saw it at an exhibition, it was really interesting.

[MichaelCracker]

Sounds really cool!