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.
