Un-dyed shoddy fabric contains the bright flashes of colours from the mixed scraps and rags that it is made from. Andrew Towse and Anne-Marie Atkinson, working together as D4, have produced scanned images that resemble shoddy in their patterns of light and shade.
The Dark Light D4: Andrew Towse and Anne-Marie Atkinson
We placed scraps of coloured cloth, silver foil, cotton wool, bandages, balls of wool and steel wool onto a scanner. We made the room we were in dark. When the light of the scanner came down, we moved the items on the scanner in different directions and different speeds. This made the picture stripey. We made three scans for each picture, putting them together in Photoshop, and changing the layers’ see-through. We can see faces in the patterns. 21