Print Club News / May 2024
I’m minded to write a little more personally here than I perhaps have before, and continue in that direction over the coming years. As I get older, it seems to me that the personal is blending with the professional, into some kind of singular existence that blends the art I make with my day to day life, in ways that become ever more inseparable. I recently heard success described as the ability to simply keep doing what you do each day, that success lies within the activity itself, not the outcome. That resonated with me!
Print Club News / March 2024
Having been a Print Club member for a while now you’ll already know that I’m a keen gardener, I love the opportunity to spend a little time outdoors each day as the year warms up. We’ve reached the point in the cycle where everything is growing fast, shoots and weeds, trees coming into leaf and bulbs appearing from the soil. It’s a beautiful moment, and one which I always greet by trying to get an hour outside first thing in the morning, at least three or four times each week if possible, before settling into my studio for the day.
Rock / Singularity / EPC edition #25
Rock singularity is the latest work for my Experimental Print Club, and also a component of the work I’ve been making during my residency at the Centre for Print Research at UWE, here in Bristol.
I’ve been building a new kiln fired glass sculpture - Vessel, a reliquary for the Holocene - and as part of that work I wanted to create some form of base component to ground the modular sculpture.
So I thought it would be fitting to choose a rock from my own locality, my garden, and use it as a part of the support for Vessel. There’s a whole load of thinking there about the rock as a barren, weathered surface, and the reliquary that contains the germ of a seed being planted on it.
Rock singularity / EPC edition #25 / WIP
I’ve been busy completing the latest Experimental Print Club edition over the last few days and weeks. It’s all come together rather nicely I think, definitely in my own top 5 so far.
Paean / One day in May / Print Club ed #14 in progress
I wanted to make a piece for the Print Club that would speak about the lockdown, but also of joy, the beauty of nature, and the inspiration that manifests, whilst also continuing with the idea of the moment in time, and the specificity of a place, that I hope has been one of the major threads of the print club project to date
Notes from a locked down studio
Where to start!? It seems like a long time ago that we were locked down in response to the Coronavirus, and I have to say that at the beginning of the process I rather assumed that it would be the end of the studio as I’ve known it over the past 25 years. The strong sense of an impending recession, coming hot on the heels of austerity and Brexit, seemed to me to sound a death knell for artists working with high street galleries as their primary source of income. Inevitably I retreated to my garden to think, and to labour. The simple task of tending the garden in Spring is a fantastic tonic, and of course, allows one to think and reflect at some length.
Experimental Print Club #11
I’ve just dispatched edition #11 for the print club. It’s titled interStella / EPC / home. The piece combines a variant from my new interStella series with photography from the garden, specifically the soil under my sweet peas. I like the idea of experimenting with ideas around combining drawing and photography, and of course the subject matter alludes to ideas including the sense of place, the idea of growth, and the earth, or soil, as root, and begins to unpack some new ideas about permaculture, and how that may sit with my practice in the future.
Print Club Edition 8
Edition 8 is going to be a celebration of Spring, and in particular that particularly beautiful combination of greens, pinks and deeper carmines that marks out the first flush of really powerful colour that comes out here in May. I've attached an image here of my new tulip border, that I planted deep in the midst of last winter, with freezing hands, sure in the knowledge that I would get a sensational blast of colour as the gardening year really gets going this spring. I have to say that I didn't plan for the bright orange ones, but in fact they have been a serendipitous addition that has no doubt been bolder and better than my original choices.