Bill Allen

Lives and works in Seattle, WA

Artist statement

My work often begins with ordinary materials, including boxes, packaging and other manufactured things that pass through daily life. I’m drawn to the qualities embedded in these objects: folds, die cuts, printed marks and structures created for practical reasons. Earlier in my career I was making work influenced by the formal language of modernism. Eventually that work began to feel too self-contained and self-referential. The packaging I encountered every day offered something different, a kind of geometry that hadn’t been invented as art at all. Its forms came from utility, manufacturing, shipping and consumption. I use these materials in different ways: as printing plates, drawing templates, stencils, photographic subjects and sometimes as objects themselves. Their original structures remain visible, but the process of tracing, repeating, enlarging and recombining them allows something else to emerge. I’m interested in the tension between the ordinary and the elevated. These are disposable things made to carry shampoo, electronics, food and everything else we consume. They can also produce forms that feel architectural, symbolic or even devotional. The work lives somewhere between those two conditions, between the thing itself and what we might see in it.

Artwork