When I was a kid, I discovered the magic of rubbing when I took a piece of paper, put it on top of some coins and rubbed a pencil over it and hey presto, the head of the Queen appeared.
This memory stayed with me all my life and emerged again when I became an art student. Since then, I have used rubbing to bring to life the cracks on rock surfaces and the jigsaw patterns of bark on trees – Scots Pine are great for this. I have rubbed fossils, stones and beach combed bits of plastic and glass. When I was travelling in the USA, I kept a record of the places I visited with rubbings.
I have got a collection in my sketch book from California and the East Coast, some of them bearing the name of the Boston or New York City. My most treasured rubbing is from the memorial to John Lennon in Central Park. I have been collecting wooden, plastic and metal objects with interesting textured surfaces. The marks I make from them on paper are the equivalent of brush strokes in painting. I have been combining natural and manufactured rubbed textures to create compositions on paper and fabric. As I have explored this way of working, I have discovered greater possibilities for creating art and I feel as though this is just the beginning.
During the last year I have looked deeply into rubbing in visual art. It is a practice that dates from antiquity. The Chinese used it to print important documents such as the entire Buddhist cannon or the teachings of Confucius. It was a primary form of communication around their vast empire. In the West we use rubbings reveal history and identity. The rubbed records from brass or stone show the fashions of bygone times, such as the fifteenth century rubbing from a monumental brass below. Sometimes a rubbing is the only image left of a monument that has been destroyed.
Rubbing can reveal more than is apparent to the naked eye. Think of the way Sherlock Holmes used it to reveal a message left as an impression on some blotting paper. Since the time of Max Ernst and the surrealist art movement, rubbing (that became known as frottage) has been used extensively by visual artists. It remains an important form of expression for contemporary artists today.
I have used rubbing to show natural patterns in nature and I am interested in the way our industrial society is leaving its mark in the Earth’s crust. If you would like to know more about rubbing and frottage and the work I have been doing with it, please take a look at the essay I have written on the subject during my final year at Edinburgh College of Art.
Illustration - Author unknown (1484). Margaret Peyton at Isleham, Cambridgeshire. Monumental brass rubbing, life-size. Courtesy of the Monumental Brass Society (2002)