Obsessive, Compulsive, Repetitive: Commissioned work 'Till Rolls'

Till Rolls was commissioned by the Towner Art Gallery Eastbourne specifically for the exhibition Compulsive, Obsessive, Repetitive (2011).

‘Till Roll’s’ is typical of Jill Townsley's practice; it is often large in scale, installation or temporary, though the physical labour applied to its construction is generally excruciatingly repetitive. She is interested in the subjective results of repetitive action, such as ‘failure', ‘temporality', ‘erasure' and 'authorship'. She generally uses everyday materials, such as, plastic spoons, broom bristles or staple wire.

In this work she has used 10,000 till roll’s, each of which has its middle extruded from the center, to form a tall vertical cone. Each cone differs in height, from very small to 3meters (10ft) high. Each roll is placed on the floor to form a giant grid; 5.7 meters square. This structure is reminiscent of a graph, though we have no access to what it is recording.

Compulsive, Obsessive, Repetitive, is a group show of sculptors who obsessively use small scale repetitive processes to create large scale installations.

The exhibition comprises five new commissions by:

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva
Brendan Jamison
Susie MacMurray
Jill Townsley
Henry Seaton (Rex Henry and Graham Seaton)

It also features an earlier work by Claire Morgan.

These artists are motivated by the need to compulsively repeat an action – in a labour intensive and painstaking way - to create a large scale installation composed of multiple elements.

From MacMurray’s sculptural drawing made from corrugated hose to Hadzi-Vasileva’s wall of salmon skins, individual elements are transformed through repetition into something more than the sum of its parts.