Exhibition. In a Country Far. Far Away, Mile End Pavillion, London

I have a piece in the exhibition In a Country Far Far Away, curated by Katja Rosenberg, at the Mile End Pavillion in London.

The exhibition runs form the 1st to the 17th March.
Link to details here.https://exhibitions.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/5/8/1258901/far_away_art_pav_folded_leaflet.pdf

There is a great programme of activities associated with the exhibition including film, music and drawing.

The theme was to choose and interpret a fairy story or fable from a war torn country. I choose The Calif Stork, a Middle Eastern fairy tale and have made a work in mixed media, using a large paper mache bowl.


The art work, Fragments of Reality is a bowl that has layers of images and painting, using ceramic designs from Persian pottery and other designs where people are turned into birds, such as the willow pattern.

There are painted images of the Calif and his Vizier being turned into storks and a silver moon.


The fragments are a reference to the tragedy of  the breaking of people and culture during war.

Afternoon Tea Works on Paper, online exhibition

I had one of my pieces in Chiara Williams's exhibition, Afternoon Tea   Works on Paper,in her flat overlooking the sea in Margate. The exhibition is part of the Margate Festival which runs till the 6th of August.

Chiara served lovely cakes and tea while folks looked around the exhibition on her walls.

The exhibition has now moved online for a short while and you can view the works here.

http://www.chiarawilliams.com/afternoon-tea.html

Grayson Perry at Turner Contemporary

photo from Turner Contemporary website

 

I have down to visit the Grayson Perry exhibition, Provincial Punk, at Turner Contemporary a few times, since its opening. I still haven't watched all the videos, but have spent time with the pots and tapestries and maps that Grayson Perry makes so well.

In the first room there is a good selection of his pots, from the 1980's to the present day. I responded to the Anti Thatcherite, class war themes, sexual freedoms and anti war messages, collaged, written and painted on the vases and pots of various types.

photo from Turner Contemporary website

Grayson Perry describes them as "stealth bombs"  as they are visually attractive and decorative at first glance, then a closer inspection shows the messages he wants to convey.

Photo from Turner Contemporary website

In the other gallery rooms, some of Grayson Perry's collages, maps and videos are showing, along side his large tapestries, including the Walthamstow Tapestry, which I'd seen in Walthamstow when it was first exhibited.

 

The maps and tapestries include many of the labels we seem to be in love with as consumers, as well as modern tribes and tourist destinations. The tapestries are bright and visually arresting, woven in Flanders, as were so many historic pieces. I am pleased that we still have places left doing such crafts.

Photo from Turner Contemporary website.

I made a few visual notes in my sketch book and will spend a bit more time looking at the work again.

Photo from Turner Contemporary website.

The exhibition is on till September 13th   and is well worth visiting, though if you have young children be aware that there are some themes that are adult in nature, the gallery is closed on Mondays.

Work on the Mr Lion Project

I have been working on some pieces for the Mr Lion project that we have been exploring in Blank Canvas at the Turner Contemporary Gallery. Link to Blank Canvas facebook page here.

Artist Lucy Steggals suggested the project following her own exploration of other figures from a series of old cards she found. Lucy's website here.

It has been an interesting few months, also working with other artists, playing around with ideas about Mr Lion's character, where he might live, what possessions he might have and what he looks like amongst other things.

We all have different ideas about Mr Lion and will be showing some of these in an exhibition, details to follow.

I have an artists book made from Japanese paper, collage and print, using the letters of the name Mr Lion and have a sketch book where I have been keeping ideas.

E17 Designers Market this week.

I have been busy getting work ready for the E17 Designers market on this Friday at the Asian Centre, 18a Orford road, E17 9LN May 13th 7-10pm. link to site and more info here The craft markets have a really good range of products and do showcase what skilled designers we have in the area. There is also live music, wine and soft drinks and goody bags to be won, so a good evening out if you can make it
E17 Designers has a new website with more information about the designers here
I am taking my new individual collages as cards, I'm enjoying collecting all the material and making up the compositions, though the sorting of material for easy use is a bit daunting.


I'm also working on some larger collages as well, some of which will have more political comment in them
Part of my interest in collage has come from the political Agit Prop work from the 1930's onwards.
Today artist Peter Kennard carries on the tradition. Good article here about his work and his own website here.
Photographers working with a collage element also interest me, such as the recent work by John Stezaker at the Whitechapel gallery link to his work here. I have started a few photographic collage pieces over the years but haven't made up a body of work with them yet. I like both the digital and more hand made aspects of collage but my photoshop skills are not great at the moment.

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John Stezaker and Exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery

I headed down to the Whitechapel Gallery this week to see John Stezaker's exhibition of photographic collage work. I have started to make some small collages myself as cards and have been interested in this way of working for a long time.

John Stezaker had some interesting work, most of the work was based around portraits, a lot of Film stars from the past and mostly in black and white. ( Interestingly and coincidentally I had just found a series of old cinema stars portraits that I had cut out for collage work)
The the subtle changes of the eyes ( an extra piece of an eye infilled in the face) in the old Hollywood portraits Love series, were enough to be slightly disturbing and made me think about the power of the eyes between people who are in love.
Other portraits had the faces obscured by vintage postcards, in the Mask series, some were more effective or clever than others in echoing the face in some way, by the features in the landscapes, bushes becoming hair, landscape features becoming noses for instance.


I liked the portraits where the whole silhouette was filled with another subject like Shadow Third Person series where in one image blue sea became sky and a mountain landscape filled the figure.

The exhibition did give more impetuous to carry on exploring my own collage work and to include more of my photographs in the work.

Other exhibitions in the gallery included Richard Wentworth's Three Guesses pieces of red thread were hung from nails all around the walls and an old fashioned cabinet of threads stood to one side.Upstairs in the main gallery artist Bethan Huws conceptual installation had raised a large part of the gallery floor, to change the space. The new floor matched the old floor (except for it being newer in colour) and looked like a platform had been put in for a performance perhaps, most people walked in and out not seeming to take much notice.
I'm not sure how much it worked to change our experience of the space, though it was meant to alter it subtly apparently.
In the smaller space there were wall texts describing some of Duchamps work and Bethan Huws interpretation of them.

Keeping it Real by Mona Hatoum was a large installation made of wire cages filled with light bulbs that went off and on, the sound of the electric currents being amplified and played in the room. A disturbing piece in some ways, with echos of prison, confinement and threat.

The Bloomberg Commission, Claire Barclay's Shadow Spans, was another installation/ sculptures that filled gallery 2 downstairs. Door and window frames were draped with fabric printed with bricks, abandoned, plant pots, hats, gloves and other seemingly abandoned objects were strewn around and fixed to the frames. It was a bit like seeing into a dream like vision of a disaster area without the really bad stuff. Apparently Claire Barclay's work" suggests the transition point between interior and exterior spaces, as well as hinting at lives behind closed doors".

Friends of the Earth Exhibition and last of the Art Trail

Yesterday I took my work down to the Changing Room Gallery for the Friends of the Earth exhibition. I am showing some photo collages called Windmills In My Mind, they are exploring the ideas about micro-electric generation. Part of my thinking is about how, in this case wind turbines, could look more fun interesting and colourful, if they were on ordinary homes and town buildings.

I took photos along a few local streets and used colourful children's windmill toys as the wind turbines on the buildings and some lampposts and added some text about micro wind generation. I also added some home made paper windmills to the collages, and made a couple for added interest.

In the gallery extra windmills have appeared decorating the walls around my work, it seems other people like these windmills too.

The exhibition is on till Sunday 27th with a party on Sunday from noon till 4pm

I just wanted to mention a couple more exhibitions that I had chance to see at the end of the E17 Art Trail.

Lino Cut at Ye Olde Rose and Crown, had a good selection of Martin Adams, martin's site here and Anna Alcock's prints. Anna's site here. Martin had added a William Morris border to the walls and included his well cut and detailed Darwin lino cut that I'd seen as work in progress earlier in the year.

In the old Crawford building lower down on Hoe Street, Image 17 were showing photographs in an exhibition called Meet. This was something I had intended to be part of earlier in the year but had proved too much for me to do in the end. Members had taken photos of various clubs and societies held in Waltham Forest. Sean Pines had some great images from the pigeon racers club, and Katherine Green's images from the cacti and succulants society were a glimpse into a different world. Image 17 website here.

Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern and Hampton Court show.

The Hampton Court Flower Show was on last week and I was there again with my sister, trying out my new camera and enjoying the show. Generally Hampton Court Show feels more spacious than Chelsea Flower show, but this year Hampton Court seemed very busy, which was fine until I had my handy cart filled with bargain priced plants.

The perfume and colour of the plants is what draws me time and time again. It is like being awash with beautiful sensations and the sheer variety of plant forms is staggering. From the same basic elements and earth, water and sun, we find all the richness of the plant kingdom.

I have also been to see the exhibition of Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern, I didn't know his work before but was really pleased to see it here at the exhibition. There were a number of his collages that inspired me, using images from the natural world, torn papers and real leaves.



His blackboard paintings hinted at lost histories of work rubbed out and his small bronze sculptures were earthy and powerful. In the last room were some great oil paintings on canvas, his "Soft Lapping of Waves Green" was lyrical and as the name implies full of green tones. Other large paintings, untitled, had reference to his geological interests, layers of formations and abstact shapes.

Ray Johnson collages and street photos.

I noticed an advert for a new gallery near Liverpool street called Raven Row, last week. The inaugural show was of the artist Ray Johnson, who worked with collages and started the mass movement of mail art.
The gallery is in a lovely building, whose history below is on the galleries site.

56 and 58 Artillery Lane were built around 1690 on land that was previously a weapons practice ground, and in the Middle Ages the site of the monastery of St. Mary Spital, the largest hospital in Europe. In the 1750s the buildings were transformed into luxury shops in the Rococo style by Huguenot silk merchants, Protestant settlers from France. Nonconformist and politically dissenting groups as well as immigrants began settling in Spitalfields, which experienced waves of violent protest, often by journeymen weavers against wage exploitation. In 1827 no. 58 was modernised with a plain Regency front, only a few years before the weaving economy in Spitalfields collapsed and the area became impoverished. 56 and 58 Artillery Lane housed many families who worked in the local food markets. Rebecca Levy, whose family moved in

to the building in 1925, still lives on its top floor.

There was a large collection of Ray Johnson's work over 3 floors, including many examples of his collages and mail art. It was good to see the multi- layered collages, with their symbolic figures and signs, some very humorous, and some of the quantity of pieces he sent out over the years. He used the popular icons of the times in advertising and celebrity culture of which he was sometimes part.Sadly Ray Johnson died in 1995 after swimming off in the sea.

Walking around the smaller streets near the gallery it was just possible to see traces of the old part of the city, most of the area has been completely modernised now.