Artist inspired by the warps of collision

By CATHRIN SCHAER

It started with a potentially life-threatening car accident. "I just loved my first car, a 1971 Mercedes - I saved for it and painted it glossy black," relates artist Andrew Taylor-Wall. "However, one night I didn't see a red light. Totally lost control, and although I didn't wreck my car, it was bent completely out of shape. It was just twisted metal."

But, he adds, "I couldn't just walk away from that car because it was totally me."

Taylor-Wall loved his old car so much he salvaged what pieces he could, including the large, shiny black bonnet. One day, standing in front of another car, he caught a warped reflection of himself in the gloss.

"You could see this sort of damaged version of yourself, " he muses.

Which started the 23-year-old Elam graduate thinking about all sorts of things - how cars are often a reflection of the driver, an insight into the driver's psyche and how they can almost be an extension of the driver's body.

The artwork that resulted, using the Mercedes bonnet and a photograph of another car bonnet, ended up in the finals of the 2002 Wallace Art Awards.

As for the rest of the car, Taylor-Wall had other sections crushed into blocks about the size of his own torso (so the scale of it related to the human body), then experimented with them, making mirror images using casts and photographs.

After making friends with a bunch of tow truck drivers, and then with the guys at a metal recycling plant - he says they think he's mad but are happy to help him out for the price of a crate of beer - he has managed to get hold of other pieces of damaged fast cars, including Porsches and Ferraris. He has done similar work with these, having the recycling-plant blokes crush them, after which Taylor-Wall paints them using a digital painting machine.

The result: twisted pieces of metal, spraypainted in various shades of white with images of wrecked cars overlaid. The artist describes these works as "both broken and beautiful".

"They're the result of some serious action. And I like how they are almost like blank canvases. You can't tell they've been damaged, it's almost like a fresh beginning because the past is insignificant.

"I also like the idea that these cars had so much power and will to go somewhere but they sort of ended up losing direction on the way. And I like the idea of machines - a machine crashes, you put it into a machine to crush it then another machine paints it and it's back to a new state."

At one stage in his not-so-distant youth, Taylor-Wall says he wanted to work in advertising because he just loves ideas. And it shows.

His works seem to involve a happy - and pretty intense - collision of ideas. Although his painting skills altered his career path in the first place, he gave up paint brushes and canvas for spray cans, computers and installations some time ago.

Taylor Wall's second solo one-night-only show is on Friday at the Bath St Gallery.

Exhibition

* Who: Andrew Taylor-Wall

* Where and when: Bath St Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell; Friday, July 2, from 6pm