Find Me on Artfinder

I am happy to say that I've now joined the Artfinder stable of artists and am feeling in very fine company indeed. As well as offering a wide selection of editioned art prints, the site allows the viewer to brows through each artists' individual page and check out original pieces at affordable prices. As I've just joined I only have a small selection of work on my ArtFinder page but more will be added very soon.

This photo of me (courtesy of Mike Saunders) looking a little unkempt was taken Thursday night when Yplan hosted a private SofarSounds evening in the Artfinder office! If, like me, you'd not heard of Sofar Sounds before and you like unconventional live music experiences then I seriously suggest you check them out. Sofar have “created a movement which brings music lovers together in secret living room locations to hear some of the world's most cutting edge artists.” To date they have held these pop-up gigs in around 20 cities worldwide.

Unfortunately I only managed to catch the name of one of the four amazing acts (Maria Byrne) at Thursday's gig so if anyone can furnish me with the rest I'd be very grateful. The three guys who made up the last act were especially funny.

This is Artfinder's Facebook page.

Nunhead Cemetery Recon

Highgate Cemetery might be the final resting place of some of the big hitters on the necro-celeb list but, for me, Nunhead is still the finest cemetery in London. Okay, it's not as overgrown and wild as once was but it's still a great place to go exploring, or take a Sunday stroll. It is full of beautifully weathered monuments and grave stones and its 52 acres is just about big enough to get yourself lost in.

So, as you can imagine, I was delighted when artist and curator, Jolanta Jagiello, invited me to take part in the 'Vignetted Windows Foretold' project - the start of which coincides with the cemetery's open house weekend (23rd/24th September). For this semi-outdoor art exhibition (the building has no roof), myself and ten other artists will each create an individual, made-to-measure artwork which will be hung in the glassless windows of the Restored Anglican Chapel. This beautifully imposing building is visible from the cemetery's Linden Grove entrance.

In this photo from a recent reconnaissance trip to Nunhead you can see the daunting size of the windows that we went to measure up. For my part I plan to build and install two narrow but 235cm tall, frame sculptures. I'll be taking a little inspiration from my current work (see my previous blog post) and plan to incorporate an array of doll parts.

Other participating artists include Debora Mo, Ahmed Farooqui, Anna Whyatt, Jill Rock, Abilene, Sally Buchanan, Elizabetha Chojak, Richard Tilby, Robert Aldous and Jolanta Jagiello.

New Work In Progress

In preparation for my up-coming solo show, 'Found Memories', at the Nancy Victor gallery in February I've been working on a new sculpture. Well, I say new – the inner section (made up of an old, cracked, porcelain doll's head and several crab legs) was something that I put together some time ago and then left on a shelf to gather dust because I couldn't decide what I wanted to do with it. This isn't the way I usually work. Usually I have an idea for a sculpture – refine the idea with a few preliminary drawings and then build the thing. But every so often I'll tinker with a few bits and pieces/materials and come up with one of my 'components' – something that I don't feel is strong enough to hold its own as a sculpture but which I might one day become part of one.

 
One of the reasons that I hadn't, until now, taken this particular component piece any further was that my original ideas for displaying it didn't quite sit right in my head. It wasn't until I'd made my tall Orifice Tower sculpture that I hit on how the component piece (which I'd just been calling Crab Doll Head – not a snappy title, I know) should progress. I wanted to encase Crab Doll Head in a protective structure that would hold the fragile piece in place but which, unlike my previous lens-fronted cabinets/boxes, would also allow more light to hit it and also give a 360° view. And the scaffold-like framework approach that I used when making Orifice Tower seems perfect for this. It's a very enjoyable and organic (even though the structure is itself geometric in construction) way to work and I almost feel as if the framework is suggesting its own path as much as I am directing it. At the moment, the sculpture is starting to look oddly shrine or chapel-like. Maybe I should call it the Little Church of Lost Innocence (or maybe not).