Welcome if you have been directed here by Outside In - I am writing an introductory piece to the work I have put into the auction ( such a good cause ) - hopefully you will have seen the images of the work I am putting in on their auction website...... the words below are an extension to the descriptions already their and explain my collaboration with poet James Simson and my trajectory from Painter to 'Bookmaker'...do scroll back and see pictures of other work I have done over the years......
James Simpson , a poet, and I met at Schumacher
College over
twenty years ago on a poetry and bookbinding course; over the week
we soon realised
that our own creative work and inspiration came from the same
wellspring and
sources, almost uncannily so …and we decided to keep in touch and
work together
on projects. We instinctively have conversations which no-one else
would
understand, he understands my primitive early scribbles straight
away and he is
the poet I wanted to be as a child before I was forced to choose
between words
or images (art education being what it was in the sixties).
I went to the Slade straight from school, where
my A Levels
in English Lit and History were frowned upon, and I fell between
two stools -
the ‘avant guard’ and the lovely old painting tutors for whom my predilection for
egg tempera was ‘not
using proper paint’…. Nobody taught us anything much anyway but I
met lovely
people and it was fun.
Unfortunately for me crossing the boundaries of
painting,
sculpture and even printmaking (… and woodcuts for heaven’s sake –
it was the
age of silk screen!) was also difficult…sculpture postgrads
smuggled me in to
use the bandsaws and useful equipment for my non-rectangular
paintings on gesso
and my curved box frames.
By the 1990’s a two year commission called Rituals and Relics as
Artist in
Residence on the South Downs, enabled me to work sequentially, pushing me towards returning to my childhood
passion for making books, now officially designated Artists Books
( so that was
now ok then! )….making my art in any way I wanted and enabling me
to keep groups
of work and ideas together; each work was a project , and turning
the pages…however
unorthodox the book and its presentation, existed materially in
time and space ......
My, possibly seen as 'old-fashioned, way of
working' is an important statement in a digital world. I agree
with Tapies, a wonderful Spanish/Catalan painter and bookmaker I
admire. He talks about a logo-centric tradition he opposes, the
illusion of the transparency of the word - the Catalan mystics
like Ramon Lull thought the book-as-an-object was a dialogue
between images and word . Tapies was against dematerialisation and
conceptualism - which he thought started with Gutenburg's printing presses and also the development of perspective in painting, and began to dissipate the
material surface of book pages and books as objects, and of paintings.
William Blake,
another of my heroes, attempted to overcome this disjunction/division of
the graphic into 'letters' and 'drawings ' with his
'illuminated
printing'. Urizen, the demi-urge - has a brush/pen/burin ....drawing
lines in an open book, writing the text with one hand while
illustrating it with another. I have James to help me! Paul Klee
invented alphabets; Brassai embraced graffiti; surrealists made
automatic drawings..... making Artists Books continues ( in many forms) but I work like a painter/printmaker, or an alchemist, with very dirty hands...trying to make gold out waste and recycling.
I use organic materials wherever possible, most
of the last decade’s
work has been very climate crisis orientated, I and it (the work)
try to walk
lightly on the planet. James and I share these concerns and all
the
philosophical ideas around it. I do not ‘illustrate’ his poems
but through
constant dialogue and sharing of work in progress we try to
extrude the works
between us. I enjoy collaboration...it keeps me on my toes and
inspires me.
We have projects planned for years ahead but
making
by hand takes a lot of time….I often hand-cut his texts…but it
is ‘slow poetry’
like ‘slow cooking’, a statement that the work is worth taking
time over - that
art and poetry are important in our frantic world.
