A Natural Line
Many thanks to everyone who came along to the recent opening event for my Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibition, A Natural Line.
And special thanks to Simon Martin, Artistic Director at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester for his opening speech.
The exhibition features about 60 framed works - limited edition prints, paintings and collaged pieces. I'm exhibiting a number of new prints there, including Lakeside Teasels and Ramsons and Campion.
The exhibition runs until 23rd February 2014 at Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. For opening times and directions, visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park website.
Water of Life
Available for pre-order and shipping from early December is this beautiful audio/print package from Water Of Life, limited to 300 copies.
Tommy Perman - artist and musician (formerly of FOUND) and Rob St. John - environmental writer and musician - began the Water of Life project in June 2013, aiming to use water as a divining rod for exploring ideas of 'naturalness' in Edinburgh’s urban environment. Water of Life is an alternative travelogue, where water is a conduit for exploring new geographies: field notes from a liquid city.
Recordings made with hydrophone, ambient and contact microphone recordings of rivers, spring houses, manhole covers, pub barrel rooms, pipelines and taps are mixed with the peals and drones of 1960s transistor organs, harmoniums, Swedish micro-synths, drum machines and iPads: a blend of the natural and unnatural; modern and antiquated; hi-fi and lo-fi. Drum beats were sampled from underwater recordings, and reverbs created using the convolution reverb technique to recreate the sonic space of different bodies of water.
The package comprises: a letterpressed folder on recycled card, a 7" record pressed on recycled vinyl and a set of essays by Rob and prints by Tommy exploring the themes of the project, riso printed using soy inks on recycled paper.
Pre-order one of the 300 limited edition packages online and find out more about the Water Of Life project.
Alex Malcolmson: Seamarks
This weekend sees the opening on an exhibition of recent box constructions by Shetland born Alex Malcolmson, made mainly from wood; carved and painted, sometimes using found materials.
The ‘boxworks’ of Joseph Cornell are an inspiration to Malcolmson, in addition to the works created by Picasso when he used collected items from his studio environment. Malcolmson is an experienced sailor and has voyaged aboard the Bessie Ellen, a traditional West Country wooden sailing ketch built in 1904, to Denmark and Sweden, sketching and absorbing the details of the ship. Other strands of interest for Malcolmson lie in architecture, charts, ship dioramas, lighthouses, and marine folk art.
The slatted birds started with the idea of an upturned boat; a motif he has used in other ways, drawing on the tradition of decoy making. Folk, naïve and primitive art; the kind of objects made for use and ornament, often by unnamed makers, is the main source of ideas for the work featured in this exhibition Seamarks.
The exhibition opens on Monday 11th November and runs until 25th November 2013. There is an opening event on Saturday 9th November 2013 from 12pm until 2pm.
Open Eye Gallery, 34 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh EH3 6QE. Visit the Open Eye website.
If you're unable to visit Edinburgh, Alex Malcolmson will be exhibiting alongside Angie Lewin at our next St. Jude's In The City exhibition in London in May 2014. Sign up to our newsletter for details nearer the time.
Water of Life
On 7th and 8th November 2013, Water Of Life collaborators Rob St. John and Tommy Perman will perform at Summerhall, Edinburgh at a night curated by Folklore Tapes called Echo of Light.
Rob and Tommy will play music from their upcoming 7″, essay and print release, using recordings made with hydrophone, ambient and contact microphone recordings of rivers, spring houses, manhole covers, pub barrel rooms, pipelines and taps, mixed with the peals and drones of a 1960s transistor organ, harmonium, Swedish micro-synth, drum machine and iPad: a blend of the natural and unnatural; modern and antiquated; hi-fi and lo-fi. Drum beats have been sampled from underwater recordings, and reverbs created using the convolution reverb technique to recreate the sonic space of different bodies of water.
The performances will accompany screenings of the 1964 film ‘Rain on the Roof’, an Edinburgh Water Corporation production featuring a forward-looking blend of pastoral, mechanical and futurist visions for the city’s aquatic landscapes. The film has been specially digitised by the Scottish Screen Archive for this rare screening.
The Water Of Life project will feature in our forthcoming Random Spectacular #2 journal. Find out more about RS#1 and sign up for details of the next issue.
Full details of Rob and Tommy's performance in Edinburgh can be found on the Summerhall website.
Eric Ravilious: Prints
Another treat for fans of the work of Eric Ravilious is this exhibition of prints by the celebrated artist and designer which runs until 8th December 2013.
Ravilious' career was cut short by his untimely death in 1942 whilst on an Air Sea Rescue mission off the coast of Iceland in the course of his duties as an official War Artist.
Acknowledged in his lifetime as a master wood-engraver and exceptional artist/lithographer, the exhibition explores Ravilious' development as a printmaker, offering insights into his methods and placing his work in the context of British art, design and industry between the wars.
Simon Martin, Curator, says: "Together with Edward Bawden and Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious was one of the most important printmakers working in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. His animated sense of rhythm, line and visual decoration give his prints a playful sense of design, whether as black and white wood engravings, colour lithographs, or as transfers on the ceramics that he designed for Wedgwood."
The exhibition runs until 8th December 2013 in the De' Longhi Print Room at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Find out more
Ravilious Wood Engravings
We're looking forward to getting our hands on a copy of James Russell's latest book for Mainstone Press.
Ravilious Wood Engravings features a selection of Ravilious wood engravings over its 80 pages, including at least one that's never been published before.
From the press release...
"Although a brilliant watercolourist, inventive lithographer and talented designer, Eric Ravilious (1903-42) was above all a wood engraver. It was in this demanding medium that he first found artistic expression in the early 1920s, and over the next two decades produced some of the finest engravings of the age. And what an age it was! Starting shortly before World War One, a succession of talented artists and designers explored a medium whose most famous British proponent, Thomas Bewick, had died almost a century earlier.
In his lifetime Ravilious was acknowledged as a modern master of wood engraving, and for Ravilious: Wood Engravings we have selected illustrations that show the evolution of a remarkable talent. Ravilious thrived on the limitations imposed by the medium, squeezing entire scenes into the tiniest vignette. Some of the engravings have the mysterious quality of his watercolours, while a wry humour animates others, such as his portrait of publisher Robert Gibbings being carried off by a giant cockerel. Running through the book is a sense of the pleasure Ravilious took in his work, which he approached with great skill and a light heart. While staying with his parents in Eastbourne he would cut his blocks with their canary fluttering around his fingers, and subsequently he always whistled when he worked.
When Ravilious died on active service as a war artist in 1942, at the age of 39, he had already achieved remarkable success. His short but spectacular career is described in a full-length introduction, which also sets his achievements in the context of the interwar years. Accompanying each illustration, meanwhile, is an extended caption designed to illuminate the engraving in an informative and entertaining way. In a manner familiar to readers of Ravilious in Pictures, author James Russell sets out to discover the places that inspired Ravilious, explore the remarkable books he illustrated and meet the people he portrayed. Ravilious: Wood Engravings is both a collection of beautiful, surprising pictures and an entertaining portrait of a wonderful artist and his world."
We'd recommend you visit James Russell's excellent blog for lots of related writings.
If you'd like to see more of Ravilious' work, we'd recommend a trip to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester where their Eric Ravilious Prints exhibition runs until 8th December 2013. More on that soon.
