#144: The Arranged Oranges
Enforcing manmade regulation onto the natural order
This week I am writing about an object put to a specific use, altered from its everyday purpose to become art. This afternoon I peeled two oranges, spread out their pieces and tried to form aesthetically pleasing patterns.
There was a reason for this. I recently discovered Adam Hillman’s Instagram, an endless gallery of everyday objects arranged in creative and attractive ways. The neatness of his arrangements of cheerios or half-burnt matches will appeal to all those who find great satisfaction in ordering their coloured pencils.
Recreating Hillman’s work, I took orange segments, objects intended for eating, and transformed them into an artistic medium. I ignored the juice bursting onto the page and saw them as shapes, bricks from which to create new forms.
The difficulty with the segments was that, being natural objects, they were not uniform. They were not made to tessellate the way I wanted them to. My three images bore the imperfections of nature rather than the clinical perfection of the manmade.
Perhaps that’s what made the process so intriguing, trying to make natural objects behave against their nature, trying to instil my own manmade sense of order onto the oranges’ own natural order. While the segments resisted my own patterns, they fit perfectly side by side in their original rounded shape. Perhaps this is why Hillman tends to stick to manmade items such as matchsticks or sweets.
Hillman’s carefully placed stationery comes with one big question: is it art? He has not created any of the objects involved, and someone like me can come along and try his techniques without any practise. Yet there is a great many skills involved that a quick comparison of his work and mine will reveal. Precision. An eye for how shapes might connect. Colour gradation. Perspective. And, of course, that impossible-to-explain skill of simply having great ideas.
I admire Hillman’s ability to turn many everyday objects into one larger image, images that are at once about simple geometric structures, but also the intricacy of the individual objects that make them up. Rearranging my own objects made me see them anew, not for any purpose, but for their integral aesthetic structure.
