Recent work

I was filling in one of those proposals and thinking that I hadn't made any work recently, but then on listing what I'd actually done so far this year I realised I'd been so busy making work that I hadn't shared it so it had sort of disappeared. Which isn't great. So here's an attempt to catch up.

The Empire

I asked Ryan Hughes, Artistic Director of Coventry Biennial, if I could help with some of the renovations at their new space at the top of The Empire, a new music venue in Coventry, in return for being able to have poke through the detritus of the building work and see what I could find. I ended up being able to do a few half days and hours helping here and there, take some scans and a few photos before my shoulder gave way, which it has been threatening to do for a while, but it was enough to generate some written work.

Using a desktop scanner to capture the essence of a place is kind of wierd because it's almost pointless. The scanners, I used two onsite just to see how different they were, only collect data from objects pressed right against the glass, the rest of sort of disappears into a blurry gloom, but they do take on a sense of ambient light, and I'd noticed, from scanning next to a window at home over six months that this appears as cast light, and I've become rather obsessed with that. So I really wanted to scan there in those rooms at the top of The Empire (a name I could play with for ever), with their odd array of James Turrell-esque skylights. 

Those images turned out pretty enigmatic, which I liked.  I also took some regular images with my phone camera and its the long shadows in these that reminded me of the surface of Mars depicted in the NASA lander photos, and this idea of The Empire extending all the way to an inhabitable planet, now seemingly inhabited by an ever growing collection of dust-covered rambling machines representing the ambitions of obscenely rich human beings. They remind me of the cloistered pet toys in the nationhood appartment of the replicant designer in Blade Runner.

The Biennial were nice enough to agree to publish some of the resulting work in an appendix to their sixth communique, which I will share properly when it's out. 

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More prosaically, but just as absorbing, I am designing and producing, in partnership with Helen Nelson, a game-based workshop about liabilities in artist practice for Coventry Artspace's artist development programme. The first part is called Navigating DisasterTM and the first workshops are about to be announced. 

I was also comissioned to draw all the illustrations for Coventry Artspace's development programme, the first part of which is Helen Nelson's Speedy CritsTM.

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There has also been further illustration work.  I designed a screen print for Talking Birds new Nest Bonds which they launched a couple of weeks ago with their very lovely new studios in the Daimler Building in Coventry. Support them! They are briliantly supportive of art and theatre in Coventry and have been so for years and undoubtedly will continue. 

I am flattered that the other illustrators they comissioned were Frances Yeung and Micheal Snodgrass which puts me in great company.  I have never thought of myself as a drawing type of artist before, and I'm delighted that it's something that others like enough to want to commission me, so I'm looking at ways to do more of this. So it wasn't like I haven't been making any work after all.

New work 'Longshore Drift' installed at St Mary's Allotments, Leamington Spa

I'm really pleased to have been invited by artist and curator Tammy Woodrow to include new work in this art & poetry trail at the Victorian St Mary's Allotments on the bank of the River Leam in Leamington Spa.

'Longshore Drift' and 'Onshore Drift' are about the movement of stone. 

I tend to think of stones as static things, but within a much larger scale of time they are not. The process of stone breaking down, wearing away and moving downwards is as old as the hills, older in fact. I've been litho-curious for as long as I can remember, and my current obsession with pebbles is fed whenever I go for a walk or visit a beach.  I particularly drawn to fossil hunting, I am staggered by the scale of timeframes involved wherein life becomes preserved in stone.

The larger images show a fossil in a flint pebble I picked up on Rye Harbour beach on the South coast. The smaller images are of another flint I found in a local field local. Flint presents its breakages well, preserving its moment of fragmentation in the difference between its weathered, chalky shell and shiny silica interior.

I thought taking a moment to think about the stones would be approporiate in an allotment. It's my experience of gardening that much of it involves bending to pick up and chuck out pebbles - helping the drift.

I was inspired to name my work by a book I read this summer called 'The Pebbles on the Beach - A Spotter's Guide' by Clarence Ellis, in which he traces the movement of stone around our shores, a process of shifting sediment called longshore drift.

St Mary's Allotments Art & Poetry Trail 2021

curated by Tammy Woodrow
​11 - 19 September 2021
10am - 4pm during Heritage Open Days Visitor Information
12-4pm, free entry

'Onshore Drift' (detail) Digital print of scanned images on ripstop fabric, 2021.

You don't have to but you can if you want

 

Resurecting an old post because I found it again and found that I still liked it. 

I can't remember what frame of mind I was in. I was probably on the train talking to myself.