Welcome to my sixth newsletter.
The new studio in the countryside is now up and running ready for the Bridport & West Dorset Open Studios in September. Doors will be open from the 7th to the 15th September, and all works will be viewable, many of which I have not detailed on my website. Now that there is more space, I am able to set up and work on several larger projects at the same time, and as I like to move freely between multiple ideas, I and am very excited to finally have the space to do this. Visitors will see the studio busy with light, colour and sound, as I will be working on the electronics side of installations more this year. I have many objects that contain electronics that entertain and interact through buttons, electronic noises, nursery rhymes and light patterns, and I also incorporate lighting into other works.
Now that the Micro show is over, I am developing a series of works based on play, using toys, activity objects and playground components. The idea so far is to recreate a kind of adult dysfunctional play experience with a view to installing it at a festival location next summer, and I am busy collecting larger scale items though as yet I don't have nearly enough for a full scale installation. You can see a quick stacking of items into a warped seesaw and I will keep playing around with it after the parts have had a jet washing as I want to light it up from inside. The first experiment with ideas of my playground themed work is now viewable in smaller works 2, here.
And here are some of the things I am looking for in order to expand the models into human scale. If anyone has seen any of this around then I would be very interested in collecting and transforming it, the bigger the better! I am on high alert now that summer is coming and all those discarded outdoor activity toys from last year's heatwave have been dug out only to find that they are broken, dirty or dated now.
Finally, I have decided to add some more of my old work to see, (there are some old drawing already), work that does not involve plastics, as I want to bring it all together and see where the reconsideration of past projects and aesthetics takes me. I have published two installation projects from the 1990s, and soon, some proposals that were never realised as I want to develop some new installation ideas that will fuse plastics, technology and light, and considering those old works is bringing something valued but lost back into my into my practise.
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