OK, here is the first part of the Vogue article. It's a written bit. Pictures to come!
ABOUT FACE
IN THIS UNIQUE COLLABORATION WITH VOGUE, ARTIST SIMON PERITON'S DRAMATIC PAPER CUTOUTS ARE SURE TO TURN HEADS. BY SARAH HARRIS. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RICHARD BUSH.
Gone are the days when doilies merely seperated cakes from plates. British artist Simon Periton, 39, has given the humble lacy paper cut-out something of a new vocation. "When I started making doilies, people weren't entirely sure what I meant. They wanted to call them something else because they thought they weren't literally going to be 'doilies'; the whole concept really annoyed them."
Periton - who is represented by Sadie Cole, gallerist also to, among others, Angie Fairhurst and Sarah Lucas - doesn't fit easily into any art movement. His work is based on opposing ideas, and his message is deeply subversive - the homespun, fussy conventionalism of a doily concealing signs and symbols of anarchy, and all this debuting at a time when the art scene was about anything but the decorative. His peers in the contemporary art world include Jane Simpson and Dan Hayes, who both prey on the mundane and the domestic - but there's nothing mundane about his latest project: he has been commissioned by Channel 4 to make a work for its art collection.
After graduating from St Martins, Periton produced a collection that touched on his punk roots and featured barbed wire, neon-pink rose thorns, chaotic riot scenes of masked gunmen and William Morris prints mixed with repeated anarchy symbols. More recently, his doilies have been sculpted into giant 3-D spheres and have become more complex, with intricate layering.
For
Vogue, Periton collaborated with fashion director Lucinda Chambers and concept-led photographer Richard Bush to create a series of masked models staring out from behind paper. "We weren't enirely sure how the end result would look, but it worked," says Bush.
"We let the idea of paper bags take over. We had fun with it. That's what we wanted it to be about." While most of the images are straightforward, others are more abstract, using Periton's doilies as veils or to cast shadowy patterns over rainbow eyes and neon-coloured lips.
This kind of collaboration is a first-time experience for Periton and Bush. But Periton isn't new to fashion; in 2000, he was commissioned to make a veil for eccentric stylist Isabella Blow after working with milliner Philip Treacy on a collection of foam doily headpieces the year before. This year, he's lent his stencilling handiwork - distressed barbed wire, torn flags and his signature anarchy "A" symbols - to Junya Watanabe's spring/summer collection.
And to think it all stemmed from tea with grandma in Kent as a snarling 14-year-old. "I was wearing an anarchy cuff and she asked me what it meant, so I explained to her that the A in the circle stood for anarchy and she said, 'Oh, that's nice, dear. Would you like some tea?'"