Lewes ARTWAVE 2025

Do come and visit......

Come and see the progress of the new project...many more images made since May....  (see previous post)....come and see why I have turned to horror.....

See why Nabokov is looking so sad

Join in the conversation across space and time, meet Shelley and Coleridge....

                         Still plenty of old stuff too......        www.artwave.org

 

The Fine Press Book Fair Oxford 3-4 May - Updates

 See post below for details of the fair, (and others I  am doing in May) and updates on talks and images...

my divided life doing my own work and writing/speaking about others is hotting up currently!

I am learning so much more about work from the past from doing my new project...

Science now shows that relating to certain imagery can enter our genes and be passed on through generations.   

Menmosyne: Memory Palace: images should be revisited and remembered to keep them revitalised...  new connections are made on the peripheries….

Above are some more images from my Orbis Pictus; Entre Chien et Loup which I will be showing as part of work in progress ... …it’s a work in progress for however long it takes, using a scrapbook format so that it is perfectly fluid until I decide to make it fixed, perhaps in a variety of forms. Victorian themed scrapbooks, often on political themes, show us a way perhaps to deal with our fractious, fast-moving, elastic times… and provide I hope a space to reflect and grieve.

 Mirroring our times I have no idea what turns the project will take, I am moved by intuition, fate and serendipitous encounters.

 Encouraged by discovering Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne: Atlas project, and Walter Benjamin’s desire to make a book made up entirely of quotations (realised partially in his Arcades thesis on consumerism - which I referenced in my last cartonera – Bonfire of Vanities) gives me reassurance I am on a valid path.

 I am making woodcuts (historic medium of political and popular commentary) of seminal works of art through the ages as ‘engramms’, used and manipulated as a vocabulary or alphabet of images, bouncing off each other to develop a ‘text’.

“History breaks down into images, not stories”   …says Walter Benjamin. 

  “Artists should today craft a mythos as a time capsule warning to our descendants not to repeat our mistakes….like the proposed cautionary folklore and imagery to deter future people from meddling with toxic waste….” Gareth Rees writes in Sunken Lands

This is an experiment in imagery, but not about deciphering meanings …     …“Pictures which are interpretable and which contain meaning are bad pictures…” says Gerhard Richter

Jeremy Eichler writes in Time’s Echo –“….we have internet access to so much stuff/info about the past now – can take virtual tours, retrieve old photos , and writing and yet at the same time we have lost the ability to really feel close to and empathy for the past – we now have research confirming that information retrieved/received digitally is not imprinted or retained in our brain in the same way as that from a printed page or further handwritten notes, we can’t practice active remembrance or commemoration so well now….”

TS Eliot   “where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we have lost in imagination?”

Tim Hyman …”And let us not forget we must hope to find our eventual audience not among our artist contemporaries but in the much less narrowly bounded cultural realms of the future…” 

The way I am using newspapers is ecological and the fact that the original print layer could eventually show through with extreme age I find really exciting – the palimpsest becomes an even more interesting document as I usually choose images or articles to print over which are relevant to the subject matter of my images… as I have done before with my cartoneras where more was left unpainted deliberately. 

Do we really believe in a future?         

“Hope is not a prognostication, it is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…..” Vaclav Havel        Beauty is in the Times-Eye of the beholder.    

On the talks front- 

since suggesting my Oxford talk title I have read the new Parenthesis ( journal of FPBA )...and a Peter Koch article discussing what makes a book a work of art or an Artists Book, which is very serendipitous as it happens - in my talk I am trying to bridge the gap between the sort books the PBFA members sell on their stands and the Artists Books being made today, and looking at books ( by women) that I think could be considered Artists Books before the term became current and developed its own categorisation. I am not keen on categories generally so come along and see what you make of it....12 midday on the Sunday 4th May....

And please visit my stand too...  old favourites as well as work in progress.... 

 

 

May is going to be a very busy month...I will be exhibiting at the FPBA Fine Press Fair in Oxford at the Examination Rooms 3-4 May and will post up a flier as soon as we get one . I am also giving a talk again this year...called

Bridging Gaps and Pushing Boundaries: some twentieth century British Women Artists and Book Arts.

It will include some wood engravers, and Pearl Binder, Kathleen Hale, Betty Swanwick, Olive Cook, Barbara Jones, Rena Gardner and others associated with book arts..

17^th and 18^th May I will showing at the Art Workers Guild where I am a brother as part of London Craft Week… go to artworkersguild.org to see what is going on and how to book for the special talks and tours of the lovely building

And on the 24^th May I will be taking part in Ink Paper Print in Lewes Town Hall with a stand
.

At all these I will showing work in progress - as well as some old favourites – what will be my scrapbooks as part of a project called Entre Chien et Loup: Orbis Pictus...an Encyclopedia of Images for Twilight Times.I have cut lots of woodblocks over the last few months and am currently printing them up to see what I have got but it is an ever evolving project and I am just going where it leads me – further details and images in due course.as it unfolds.

New archive of older work in progress from former website and an important Save the Date

 New Year new resolutions - I am in process of adding images of all my books from Gawain onwards from my previous website to the archive slot below my profile...this may take some time! I appreciate your patience! 

Work from 2007 and onwards will appear within the archived blog thread as usual.

I have also now included an easier contact form below the blog archive.

Many thanks to my brilliant and patient technical advisors!

The dates for this years Fine Press Association Fair at the Examination Rooms in Oxford 

are 

3-4 May...not so far away now the year has turned.... I will be there exhibiting.

More information to come over the next few weeks..... but keep scrolling through the Blog Archive too for recent events... in due course I will add reference dates/links to projects and books illustrated in the Blog Archive and list into the ArtArchive for the years 2007 - 2024

meanwhile , my New Year card courtesy of William Blake...