The Prophet and the Bees - Exhibition at Shakes Galerie, Prague

My second solo exhibition, held in Shakes Galerie, U Lužického semináře 10, Praha, from 15.1.2010 to 15.2.2010. I had my brown notebooks on display, and unfortunately (to put it mildly) one of them went missing during the exhibit. Nine months of annotated research, writing, and drawings for my upcoming MA gone all at once. That'll teach me the folly of not backing everything up online...

The series of large (~6' x 2') works after which the show was titled are mixed media monoprints / drawings based on the idea of pareidolia, or seeing patterns in random stimuli. They are process-works, printed with ink-soaked scraps of paper, which leave a variety of traces. These traces are built up into layers of texture, which begin to suggest forms. I then use a variety of hand-media to bring out the forms I 'read-into' the textures. Perhaps because of the nature of the semi-dreaming process I use, or perhaps simply because of my preoccupation with mythology and symbols, the forms which emerge from this process tend to be resonant with linked symbolism and implied narrative. I then add handwritten and transfer-type words and letters that spontaneously occur to me when staring at the images. The forms and texts are added to slowly over a number of weeks, and the creation of the four works in the series overlapped, leading to a spontaneous 'intertextuality.' In this way the works become a non-linear myth cycle, with a variety of narrative paths between the figures and objects.

In order, the work shown in the photographs is:

"Judge" (2009) rope, brass tripod, electrical socket.

"Hi-Viz" (2009) found board, highlighters, pencils, correction fluid, drawing ink.

"The Prophet and the Bees" and "Perpetual Apocalypse" (2009) , MÅLA paper, drawing ink, highlighters, pencils, markers, correction fluid, fluoro price stickers, transfer type, fire.

"Plague of Language" and "Skin, or the rubble at Babel" (2009)[materials as prev.].

"Night Map" (2009) found paper, drawing ink, GROG graffiti ink, markers, highlighters, pencils, correction fluid, fluoro price stickers, transfer type, fire, jigsaw piece.

Many thanks to Natalia Vasquez Photography for the images.

Fluoro on the Road

Tiny Worker Says, Tiny Microscope Says, and the Eisegetics Institute ashtray

Found Paintings - Slavoince

Empty Signs

The Ruin

I am now living in Prague. There is a place here I call The Ruins. One day I found men there. They were marking up the ruins with their bright paint, whether for reconstruction or demolition I do not know. The paint is brighter than anything around it; it takes invisible energy and makes it into light.

This Foundation Stone

I'm reading Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, on loan from AHB. He writes in soundbites, shorthand. Writes of the scurf of abandoned tags and slogans, lateral moraines deposited in sidestreets by the glacial movements of the capital's polity, each graffito a letter in the great unending unreadable name of London, written in its native tongue. The city's language a hydra of tongues, a mouthful of tongues and limestone teeth, a great mute body skinned with a sea of such mouths, silently scrawling over the brickwork with their felt-tipped tongues. A freewheeling fragmentary prose, a pandemic infectious cant cultured in London's feral book trade...

This photo, however, was taken in Bristol.

Found Paintings

I took these digital photographs at the Bristol School of Art. This kind of suface is the result of layers and layers of accidental painting and repainting. Contriving to produce such a surface rather defeats the point, and (like the difference between distrssed furniture and an antique) often looks daft. Of course, the act of framing a section of a rich, paint-spattered environment is a powerful one. Compositional beauty (perhaps all beauty) lies in the correct application of a grid, and I am no photographer. Often, the beauty my eye finds in these found paintings in the environment relies on a semi-conscious editing out. I cannot photograph what I see.

I have a passionate attraction to all things distressed, dirty, moldy, verdigris or patinated. Looking at lichen or the cracks in leather can occupy me for hours. I think it has something to do with the scale-invariance; aerial photographs and microscopy have much in common. Staring into rockpools, I lose my sense of scale. For a feverish moment, my sense of myself expands and contracts at the same time.

I seem to loom, ballooning, yet simultaneously, vertiginiously, to dwindle down to a mote. I call this sense 'the giantiny'. Along with this scale trick, the kind of surfaces in which I find most pleasure have that quality of Leonardo's Wall (which many men have spat upon). Yet even this rich hallucinatory material does not fully explain the almost culinary attraction I have to this kind of thing. They are a feast for my eye (I have but one). On seeing such a surface in life or art, I almost need to lick my lips. Reach out and grasp with my hands. Open my mouth. I cannot fully describe the sensation, the hunger I have for the speckled surface amazes me.

I have a troubling 'Truth to Materials' Leech-style superego, which takes an offence (comic in its intesity) to material made to look like something it isn't, but in a half-arsed way. A copy of a copy. Why, for example, do cigarettes have mottled orange filters? The filters were once made of cork. Accident lazily becomes tradition. The reason such a thing as the colour of cigarette butts makes me so angry is, I hope, bcause it is emblematic of a wider trand in culture. The future becomes a thoughtless shallow copy of the mask of the past.