Studio Diary
A visual record of goings on during most of the winter months. And early spring, almost into summer…
It’s been a while. So in roughly chronological order, here’s a round up of what I’ve been up to art and design-wise over the last several months.
The REVOLVE project which culminated in a show last September has evolved into the EVOLVE project which runs along similar lines. There are 14 artists taking part this time. We will show again as part of Heritage Open Days in September.
I started off with a few ideas for the project which were going nowhere fast so my artist collaborator friend Anne Guest and I started a joint contribution based on our old Instagram ‘tit for tat’ collabs that we’ve done several times in the past. We’re taking it in turns to make a piece of work, responding to each other’s previous piece in some way, whether through shape, colour or subject matter. It’s been a lot of fun and just by ‘doing’ has led me to revisit some of my previously discounted ideas, one of which now has some legs I feel.
I’m translating some of the vast amounts of spam emails that I get daily, into coloured blocks. I’m then bending these into cylinders, each which will hang from a thread, together forming a mobile. I’m calling it ‘attention seekers’ or something along those lines.
In the New Year I produced an interactive/installation piece for The Hope Exhibition, the inaugural show in the newly formed art space at St.Andrew’s in Worcester. Artists were invited to submit work on the theme of Hope. Part of my statement read:
You can personalise Hope by simply placing ‘I’ and ‘you’ around it. Two small words which turn a general desire into a personal wish from one human being to another.
‘I hope you…’ can turn what can be quite an abstract sense of hopefulness into something with more definition and purpose. When you express your sentiments to someone else, it becomes personal, showing that you care.
This artwork focuses on the personal aspect of Hope. These individual portions of Hope contain phrases found in song lyrics along with more general sentiments.
The audience was encouraged to interact with the work. They could pick up the jars to read the messages, move things around and stack them differently. They added their own personal wish to a jar by writing it on a blank slip.
A video/multi-media collaboration with fellow Collective members Steph Green and Paul Robert was given its world premiere at St.Stephen’s, Redditch in April. ‘It is Finished’ was part of an immersive art installation; a cinematic meditation on death, resurrection, and the weight of waiting.
The still photos, which made up the timelapse of the piece, were taken once an hour over 18 days whilst the tulips slowly faded away. (I only managed to trip over the tripod once…)
I haven’t done any photography worth mentioning for a while now, just one of those lulls which happens from time to time. I have been continuing to explore my generative art a bit more though. I was experimenting with irregular grids and applying these to a flow field, which is where my latest piece has evolved from. This was for the Wonder exhibition which is currently showing in the Dean’s Chapel in Worcester Cathedral as part of the Worcestershire Literary Festival.
‘one-deux’ is a piece which subverts the title of the exhibition with a poetic play on words. The intention is to engage the viewer beyond the surface aesthetic of the artwork. Presented as a diptych, the images are vector plotted and hand-coded in Javascript.
On the design front I’ve done a few promotional flyers for ArtCan, the international arts organisation that I volunteer with. Most exhibition flyers depict one or more pieces of the artwork that have been selected for the show. For Artistic Intelligence I came up with a piece myself as the work itself hadn’t been selected at the time. A dip pen was used to draw simple strokes around the title wording then the A and I were painted in to highlight them.
And finally, some pictures taken over the last few months in and around the Collective.
