Who are your art influences? Kirsty Hall

Kirsty Hall is an artist and freelance curator based in Bristol, England. She writes a blog, Up All Night and also worked on a year long project called The Diary Project.

"Capturing the traces left behind by events and finding ways to embody memory within objects are central concerns in my art. My work involves the accretion of large numbers of small objects – pins in fabric, knots in string or hundreds of envelopes – to make sculptures or performances that deal with fragility, decay, loss, repetition, obsession and time. My work is never fabricated by teams: when I burn 3,533 matches, tie thousands of knots in string or repetitively pin a length of material, it is my time and work that is being measured."

Drawing Statement: A few of the tiny drawings I've been doing lately. I'm restricting myself to pencil and gesso on pads of A6. I like working on this small size with such a restricted palette. It frees me up to work fast and loose in an uninhibited fashion, which is what I need right now.

3 Score & 10 String 2003 - 2005


3 Score & 10 is part of an ongoing series of work exploring the meaning and measurement of time. The knots represent the number of days (including leap days) that you would experience if you lived to your biblically allotted 70 years. It contains 25,568 knots and took just under two years to complete.

"Wow, my art influences - hmmm, that's a tough one because there's so many.I've gone for a mix of background stuff that's been a general influence and artists who've either had a long lasting affect or who were incredibly pivotal at specific moments in my artistic development."

In no particular order, apart from the first one:

1. Eva Hesse - absolutely top of my list and it definitely shows in my work

2. Paul Cezanne - it probably doesn't show in my work now but when I was just starting out, he taught me how to see.

3. Folk Art and Outsider Art

4. Giorgio Morandi - I find the quietness and paleness of his still lives very compelling.

5. Ben Nicholson - for his use of white and the way he isn't afraid of emptiness. He's someone I come back to time and again.

6. Petah Coyne - I strongly relate to her use of accretion and obsession.

7. Helen Chadwick - the first contemporary artist I fell in love with, all the way back in the 80's. When I saw her work, I realised for the first time that art could be more than realism.

8. Ann Hamilton - for her poetic narratives and also because she's one of those artist who regularly makes me think, "damn, I wish I'd made that!"

9. Tom Friedman - I love the way he sets up projects with very defined rules and sees them through to their ultimate conclusions. The way he combines humor with intellectual rigor is very inspiring to me.

10. Ernst Haeckel - a very big influence on my drawing. I love those crazy Victorians!

11. Museums and Cabinets Of Curiosities

12. The Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi

13. My granny on my Mum's side - she was my first model for what a creative woman looked like.

Scatter Statement: February 2006 Pins, fabric, wood

At what point does a labor of love become a futile obsession?

Scatter took 31 hours 24 minutes to make, spread over a period of 8 weeks. Altogether I pinned 280 rows and each row contained either 46 or 47 pins, which means that I put at least 12, 880 pins into this piece of fabric. However, because of the inherent fragility of the work very few of those pins now remain in the piece. With each row that I pinned more of the previous pins would fall out: in effect, the making of the piece also proved to be its unmaking. So my many hours of work have become almost invisible. Indeed, you only have my word that I did the work at all, although the tiny snags and pinholes in the material also bear witness to the thousands of missing pins.