Blank Forms
Academic and writer, Ruth Abbott and I have just started a collaborative project which looks at the printed form - pre-printed accounts, spreadsheets, invoices, questionnaires - from 18th Century to this day. With an interest in note-taking, the unfinished, the raw material, one aspect of our research is to look at how pre-printed paper circumscribes its use in terms of gathering and ordering information, as well as how it enables a freedom from the pressures of the blank page when used for something entirely different. Pierre Alechinsky often drew on invoices and headed paper, and Pierre Bonnard sketched in old diaries using anything he could lay his hands on, drawing with pencil stubs and burnt matches. I have sometimes made drawings on graph paper, perhaps for the same reason, and because I like the free, organic forms against the gridded architecture of the background. One of the exciting things about the collaboration, for me, is not to have a clue how it will really work, what it will look like or even become. Ruth and I often talk about the project. At this stage, I’m just trying to work out how to use some of the paper I’ve collected, especially how to draw without trying to compose the page. I am interested in finding new ways to circumvent the conscious mind when drawing, and have tried drawing in the dark, drawing at the end of the day, trying hard anyway not to over-think, or think at all, when drawing.
26/2/2024
25 Wilton Road, Victoria, London
This is a redevelopment of a former department store opposite Victoria station and was completed in July 2017. I was commissioned by MAX Architects to design two steel portcullis gates 3m x 4m which were fabricated by SCX Special Projects in Sheffield. Each panel weighs 800 Kg and the steel was cut using high pressure water jets.
The Myth of Brilliant Summers by Austin Collings
In 2014 I was commissioned by author Austin Collings to make four drawings for the inside covers of his unsettling and evocative book of short stories.
Toulouse-Lautrec Party
In 2014 I was asked to make a piece of work for Toulouse Lautrec Party an event at Firstsite, Colchester for Bruce McLean’s retrospective at the gallery. I showed a three minute animation of drawings, a few of which are here.
The Second Person
In 2011 artist Romily Hay and I collaborated on The Second Person, a large-scale book of drawings which was the culmination of 6 months work. Each of us drawing in pencil on one side of the paper and then swapping the pages so drawings by both of us are physically attached. The book explores the relationship between poetry and drawing and though made in London the drawings are consistently about nature, often the threat and menace of nature at the city’s outer limits. It was also made as a celebration of the book as physical object and at a time when the e-book seemed destined to eclipse the real.
http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/pdf/newspdfs/74.pdf (pages 31 - 32)
