Welcome to my eleventh newsletter.
Firstly a massive thank you to all the people who came to the Winter Arts Expo show at Corscombe in December, it was a fantastic experience, lots of visitor feedback, great exposure and of course a perfect excuse to complete several works that had been stalling for some time.
I finally found the solution to completing the now titled 'Poleaxed' work that has been several years in the making, and my largest work to date. There is still the detail of the flashing lights to complete, but essentially it is done and I am really happy with the feedback so far. This was a tricky one to do as I was essentially trying to imitate the way I have been creating my tiny 'kinder egg' works, those miniature models from tiny found objects, mutated Kinder model components and their eggs, such as the models on the top two rows of my cabinet.
It is much harder to put large objects together, and the balancing act is epic when assessing what may go where and why! The arms alone involved the breakdown of an entire vacuum, all of which went back into the sculpture. The eleventh hour addition of the squashed paddling pool and slide really made it work for me, emulating those free plastic fast food models they used to give away with kids meals.
Exciting news to announce now. I have another show coming up in June at The Townmill Galleries at Lyme Regis with artist David Smith, whose work I have admired since meeting him a couple of years ago at my first open studios event in West Dorset. His work reflects many characteristics of my own repetition body of work such as an obsession with repeating forms, creation of systems, rules and order to name but a few. We will be showing together in The Malthouse gallery, a fantastic bright space that will really show off the predominantly 2 dimensional, wall based works to great effect.
I am going to show a lot of works here, many of the repetition works I still have, including a few new ones that I am really excited to show for the first time. We have just been going through some potential works to include, putting them side by side and recording the effects, looking at design and layout of potential advertising material, and discovering many interesting things as we see our works in a new context for the first time. It is a very exciting way to stimulate growth in work and push interpretation in new directions.
The show is entitled 'Worse things Happen At Sea' and runs from the 23rd - 29th June 2021, so do come along if you are in the area, it would make part of a great day out, more details to follow shortly, though for now you can read about our show in the current issue of Evolver Magazine here
And here is a snapshot of our feature if you just want to see it.
I have been experimenting a lot more with the resins that I have been using to bed many of my new repetition works. The first of these occurred when I overestimated the amount of resin I needed for another project, added too much of the wrong pigment and had to make a quick decision as to how not to waste it all. I grabbed one of the works from the cabinet and something to create a mould out of and couldn't believe the result when it finally set and I placed an led underneath it. This is definitely not the only time I will use resin and pigment to create an underwater scene, it works so well with the aquatic context of many of the stories I create, especially the shipwrecks and sunken treasure focused works.
At the request of the curators of the last show I was in I created a new cabinet of curiosities and captured it in a better photo where you can see some of the detail. These are many of the smaller works, ones I am currently continuing with a view to collect them altogether into a publication as I don't particularly want to part with them, they are studies on one level, and remind me that when I do attempt to develop larger, seemingly more ambitious works these contain all I need in inspiration and guidance. The cabinet has not yet been exhibited outside of my open studios events, though is on permanent display there for when the next open studios event happens. I may again have to create my own open studios soon, before the end of summer.
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