About the fair
Specialising in contemporary British printmakers in particular, TAG Fine Arts, curated by Hobby Limon, have been exhibiting my work at the London Art Fair since 2016. The fair takes place annually at Islington's Business Design Centre, originally The Royal Agricultural Hall, it's now one of the best exhibition spaces in the capital.
The fair makes for a great start to the year, presenting an evolving selection of some of the best contemporary British work around, alongside C20th modern masters, a lively roster of international galleries and Photo 50, a broad overview of current photographic practice.
Hobby's flamboyant hang has created a fabulous opportunity to exhibit some of my larger works, including Motorik / TWO / chromatic shift, Eight Ball and Collider / gilded mandala.
Work in situ
Studio visit and interview with Helena Cardow
Excerpt from a longer conversation and interview with Helena Cardew of TAG Fine Arts. Link to the full text here.
HC How and when did you first start working with TAG Fine arts, how did the relationship develop?
CE I’m a relative newcomer to the TAG stable. I guess we’ve been working on projects together for about three or four years now. I’d seen Hobby around the fairs over recent years, and was keen to forge a relationship with him, he’s a contemporary dealer who shows work both nationally and internationally, which is great. I also felt that TAG have a strong roster of quite graphic artists, many of whom work with print, and as such felt we might be a good fit…
HC Can you define what art means to you, in 150 characters or less?
CE Art is, without any doubt, the total arc of a life spent studying and practicing the form.
HC Describe what your studio space is like.
CE A little over ten years ago I moved down to Bristol from London. Bristol provides a kind of anarchic satellite to London’s muscular capital, still spinning well within London’s orbit, but not playing by all of the same rules.
It’s interesting to note that Britain’s two most notorious artists, Banksy and Hirst, both emanate from here. Bristol has a beautiful, vibrant community of artists, musicians and writers, that makes for a really fabulous scene, where affordable (ish) studio spaces are still achievable within the city limits. I’m no longer sure that London can claim to be able to provide affordable spaces for artists anymore? Not sure…
The space I have today comprises three rooms within a larger house. A quiet basement room for drawing, mostly although not entirely on my digital system. This room also houses my fairly haphazard ‘library’ of books that I’ve collected over the past 30 years or so, along with a tonne of printed ephemera mostly stored in boxes, that combines into a kind of visual catalogue and resource for many of the shows I’ve seen, as well as providing a kind of visual reference, often tangential, for the ideas I’m trying to resolve into new studies.
I also have a separate larger room for printmaking and framing, with racking for completed work, my print making equipment, my dad’s old plan chest and a central work table that probably needs to be bigger, my prints are often hanging half on and half off the surface, but it seems to work.
Finally there’s a beautiful, battered, old Victorian conservatory, heavily bomb damaged in the war, that now serves as a makeshift wood working and painting space as required. There’s a romance embedded here, which speaks directly to the idea of the artist working in a slightly ruinous old building, a trope which still appeals to me, although less so in the winter!
HC How important are current affairs to your works?
CE I’m endlessly fascinated by politics and current affairs. That said, my interest and study tends towards researching more timeless, fundamental things. I’m really interested in studying how things work, visually and structurally, at a base level. How light, line, colour and form work, and interplay to create structure, be that natural or manmade. I’m much less interested in narrative art that intends to tell a story, and I have very little time for glib one liners, described pictorially. There needs to be some space left for the viewer to experience and consider their own thoughts and experience in relation to the work.
It has been said that the space between the viewer and the artwork is where the art really exists.
It’s an interesting moment. It seems almost possible that the printed image and the printed word may be subsumed by electronic and screen based representations of imagery and ideas, as the move away from the printed page and printmaking continues. But in contention with this thought of course is the human desire to create haptic objects and experiences, which keep us rooted in the physical world.
Much of my current study concerns the interface between the digital and the physical, especially in regard to the production and manifestation of contemporary artwork, paper vs screen, static vs animated, illuminated vs reflective, digital vs analogue, and so on.
It seems increasingly the case that this apparent division is in fact melting away, and that C20th ideas of the real world and the virtual world will in fact hybridise into a more integrated whole, as technology becomes wearable, or even embedded, and ever more closely integrated into our daily experiences.
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Link here to read the full interview ⟶
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Helena Cardow, TAG Fine Arts, November 2018
Link to exhibited works
