MARK HILLTOUT
Hilltout has an honours diploma in Graphic Design from Birmingham College of Art and Design.
He spent most of his working life as head of Art for Ogilvy working in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, New York and Europe. A love of Africa has been in his blood ever since he first travelled overland through the continent as a young man. He lives and works out of his loft in Woodstock, where he brings mere ideas to life. His current challenge is to bring to life the textural beauty of unwanted, rusted and painted corrugated iron.
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Mark's panels were produced in small, limited editioned quantities, and are now highly collectable artworks.
Artists Statement:
I am fascinated by imperfection, in all facets of Art and Design. This has drawn me to the beauty of old, painted and rusted corrugated iron.
To unearth the delicate patinas and textures that have formed naturally over time. To take these metal sheets away from their cluttered environments, examine them and understand their fragile elegance. Then work and re-form them, bring their inherent exquisiteness to life and our attention.
To expose the depth within a block of colour and texture allowing it to evolve and deviate in front of our eyes. To get lost in the abstractness, and find ourselves again.
My current work has been most influenced by the paintings of William Turner (1775-1851), Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Nicolas De Stael (1914-1955).
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Click here to read a fascinating story on Corrugated Iron.
AVAILABLE WORKS
B3. Medium: Corrugated iron painting. Found, beaten, revealed, assembled.
Size: 97 cm x 97 cm.
R38 500
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SOLD
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Cooling Towers. Corrugated iron work.
115cm x 65cm.
R 65 500
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CORRUGATED IRON A STORY
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Corrugated iron was first patented in 1829 by Henry Robinson Palmer, a British architect and engineer to the London Dock Company.
The oldest sheets in existence are therefore just under 200 years old*.
To many, rusted corrugated iron is a cast away material to be used only in the absence of alternatives. To my mind, it is endlessly complex and gloriously imperfect; something that time alone can create.
Corrugated iron is a material at the mercy of the elements. Bleached by the sun, torn by wind, worn by rain, scorched by fire and repainted by man, each sheet bears its unique history proudly. The layers of paint, patina and rust are finally unified into an authentic and exhilarating surface - a palimpsest in metal.
I search for and collect discarded sheets from a metal scrapyard in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.
These sheets can be anything up to a hundred years old, perhaps even older. Out of 100 sheets that I find, only 10 or so are suitable to be used in the studio. I look for interesting changes in colour, pattern, texture, grain and patina, although I won’t know what I have found
until the sheets have been flattened and cleaned.
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At the studio the sheets are sorted by hue into a ‘library of iron’. Every sheet, no matter its age or the colours it has been painted, is unified by two hues. The first is the iron itself - a neutral dull-silvery grey colour that occasionally reveals itself where the layers of paint have flaked or chipped off. The second is gnawing rust, which comes in a wide range of browns; from warm orange to near black amber – sunset to midnight.
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The iron and rust hues dominate every sheet no matter how often it has been repainted. This means that when two different coloured sheets of different ages and sources are stitched together, they are invariably compatible. Just like old friends.
It would be impossible to try and recreate the multitude of random nicks, chips, scrapes, blemishes, bruises and tears that texture every sheet. It is precisely this unpredictability that keeps the viewer’s eye engaged and the artist’s eye enthralled. We are drawn to erratic
shapes and patterns, if only to make sense of them.
The more I study corrugated iron, the more I realise that the metal itself should dictate the composition of each artwork - that the artist must not get in the way of the medium. So when people look at my work, I hope they will appreciate the beauty of the material that I
love so much and perhaps understand why I use it as an artistic medium.
* From Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier by Adam Mornement and Simon Holloway
2007, Frances Lincoln Ltd.