Hello. Several years ago I used to publish an occasional newsletter called the Taglibro, and I thought that I'd start it up again. These are odd times, aren't they? Odd times, strange times, terrible times. I feel a bit bad about having had such a bleak outlook for such a long time, when I could have been focusing on the bright side. I could have been skipping down the street humming cheerful tunes. I could have been drawing fluffy bunnies and uplifting scenes. But no. I'm sorry about that; I just couldn't help it with the bleak dystopian stuff. And now there's a global pandemic of viral pneumonia to put things into perspective. If ever there was a time for fluffy bunnies it's now. But I just can't do it. Again, I apologise. So, what am I to do? Well, there's this:
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Last year I made a book with the writer Robert Macfarlane. It was called Ness and was inspired by a narrow shingle island that lies just of the coast of Suffolk, a county in the east of England. As the process of designing and producing a book is a little reductive, I had intended to put on an exhibition of all of the artwork I made for the project, not just the page-sized monotone drawings reproduced in the book.
The artwork I made for the book was based around the idea of a kind of archaeology of industrial guilt. Orford Ness, the island that was the starting point for our book had been used for most of the 20th century as a giant research facility for various instruments of war and death. Now the place has a mournful, haunted atmosphere which I tried to capture. I took the original drawings and reproduced them as screen prints, with gold, silver and copper - both as leaves and as fragments - overlaid onto the paper. The eeriness attained a scintillating beauty, and somehow it was as if the natural beauty of the coast of East Anglia had been revealed once more, the veil of military industry lifted.
There are nine new prints in very small editions - 23 in the case of the smaller prints, and 13 of the larger one - as well as the large drawings I made during the first stages of planning the book with Robert. These were made on site, on the East Anglian coast, with materials found on the shoreline; sea-coal, charcoal, clay, mud, soot and other beach detritus. These drawings never saw the light of day, as I later decided to print the book using letterpress, and these drawings would have required lithography, an entirely different printing process.
The show was going to be opening on March 26th at the Whistleblower Gallery in Brighton. But obviously that can't happen in any kind of normal way, so instead the gallery is going to open the show on Instagram Live at 6pm UK time, 2pm NYC time and 11am in LA. The gallery's instagram is here: @whistleblowergallery.
Prior to that you are invited to email the gallery for further details (sizes, prices and so on) by using the link below.
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