Flight

My solo show is up in Material Gallery, and looks really nice! This is a cosy shop in a cute market town called Ludlow, in the heart of Shropshire, that is gaining a well-deserved reputation for fantastic books and magazines on design, as well as printed works and design led gifts.

I am showing prints, books and animations from the past few years, and in this space the different series of works seem to talk to each other…

Three Sleeper prints from 2009 hang in the main room, next to my first lithograph, Tiger Twins; both series depict dream-like interactions between sleeping girls and fictional beasts.

The Tiger Twins print was made in Aberystwyth School of Art with Tamarind Master Printer Paul Croft, and subsequently metamorphosed into the inspiration for my series of linocuts called Devour, one of which became the cover of last year’s Orange fiction prize winner,”The Tiger’s Wife.” So it seemed appropriate to order in a few copies of The Tiger’s Wife and put my autotgraph inside!

The Tiger books sit next to a wall full of fish. These prints I made in 2002 when I was fresh back from Japan and working in Kent close to a koi carp farm. I gave all of these fish completely fanciful names, like Fatso Bubbles, Dragon Baby and Record Groove, and it was my first project in a print studio in the UK.

Tucked into the bookshelf of Tigers we hid a mini projector and made a tiny screen at eye level to show my animations. This was a good solution to finding a dark spot in the shop for a movie screen without compromising the lighting elsewhere.  Shift, Costanza, Lucid Mask,and Time Slice films play on a continuous loop. You can view all of these on youtube if you click on the links on each of their names.

In the show, there are three types of mask print: the Mask prints from 2008 in glowing silkscreened colours; the Lucid Mask animation from 2010, and Fractured Masks from my residency in Liverpool’s Bluecoat in the same year. I wanted to show prints which have not been shown much since I made them.

The work from past two years on ghostly clothing takes up a good portion of the back of the shop. There are Dancing Dresses and pieces from the Shadow Dance series, which depicted clothing from Native American archives in the late 19C.

Next to these, the latest pages from the book Swallow are pinned to the wall.

Talking of books, underneath the Dancing Dress prints are a selection of 14 of my smaller hand printed and laser copied books including many flip books and books with hidden pages and unusual folds.

The whole show has more than 40 prints, and runs until the 27th May. 131 Corve Street, Ludlow. Catch it if you can!

 

 

Design Week review

Hooray, Design Week have featured my show in their website. To read the article, please follow this link:

http://www.designweek.co.uk/whats-on/wuon-gean-ho-flight/3034485.article

Meanwhile, all the work has been delivered, apart from the pages of my new book “Swallow” which are steaming hot from having been freshly printed today. I really enjoyed the sample of Gamblin Portland Intense Black relief ink that I received at the SGCI conference, and used it to the very last drop… It went a surprisingly long way, I’m sure I got 100 prints out of a 50ml tube!

This is another of the pages, at the proofing stage.

I enjoyed the thinness but richness of the ink. Here I selectively wiped one area of the block and rolled up with a sparsely charged roller to get the grey and the black differences. Will post more pages once I’ve scanned them in.

 

Solo show in Ludlow next week

I’m having a solo show in Ludlow from the 5th to 26th May,  Material Gallery, Corve Street, Ludlow. This is the cutest market town in the UK!

Come on by and see old and new works on paper and in book and animation format. I’ll be there for the party on the 4th May from 6-8pm. Would be lovely to see you there.

I’m hoping to finish a new book called “Swallow” by then as well. Been carving and printing it in lino all week, but it has been taking many dark twists and turns, and I’m not sure if it will be finalised by then.

For now I will show you one of the page spreads from the book here:

Anyhow, looking forward to seeing any of you who can make it, and for those who can’t I wil put photos up here soon.

 

Insectorium

Well, even though I love making prints, there is part of me that wants to be a flying creature. Today, I spent a couple of hours with photographer Paul Weaver making weird insect-like pictures. Here’s a couple of them… We had fun!

 

Another investigation into Flight

Montefiore Flip

 

Investigating Flight

I’ve been enjoying remaking Muybridges’ “Animal and Human Locomotion” by putting together this sequence of photos taken by photographer Paul Weaver, “Investigating Flight”.  If I could fly, this is what I’d do, wave my arms around in a vertical sort of butterfly motion…

 

Shows in April

In all the fluster of New Orleans, I forgot to mention I’m in quite a few shows in the UK and abroad in the next few weeks.

1) Kicking it off will be a group show called Spring at the Smokehouse, with 50 artists all responding to the theme of spring. That show opens on Thursday 5th April more details are here. I’ll be showing my new dancing dress animation, Shift, in a vertical format, with a dress flying above it on the wall. There will be many other friends and colleagues at this show so please come and check it out.

2) I’ve been invited to be a guest artist in the 8th British Miniprint show, which opens on the 12th April in London Print Studio. My print is a big one, to show off how cute and small the other prints are, I’m sure! Other guest artists include Guy Langevin, He Weimin and Ana Maria Pacheco. More details here.

3) On that same day, I have 3 books in the 6th International Artist’s Book Triennial, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2012, on the theme of Love. All my books are about love, I realise. More details here.

4) Next up will be a group Lino show, Linoleum: The Cutting Edge, in Hemingway art, Oxfordshire, opening on the 14th and a celebratory steam roller event on the 28th April, more details here.

LINOLEUM art show invitation

This is from the blurb: Artists from the UK, USA and Germany present works that push the boundaries of the seemingly simple linocut artform, through large-scale prints, installation and animated films. The artists are Victoria Browne, Steve Edwards, Bill Fick, Wuon-Gean Ho, Scott Minzy, Nick Morley, Carsten Nicolaus, Chris Pig, Peter Rapp and Mark Andrew Webber.

5) I’m in the Glasgow International Book Fair on the 28 and 29th April, with East London Printmakers, should be a fun event.

6) Finally, one month away, but counting down, I have a solo show in Ludlow, Material gallery, opening on the 6th May.

PS) Oh yes, just got mentioned in the Guardian on Friday, my book cover for the Tiger’s Wife was singled out as different from the rest, in a good way. Nice!

 

Fantastic New Orleans

The SGCI conference in New Orleans was a right bonanza.

Imagine over 1500 printmakers all partying in a town famous for its hedonism, fried food and jazz. Seriously, there are naked lap-dancers in the bars in the middle of the day!

It was amazing. The town is set on the banks of the Mississippi, a steamy grey thing.

Buildings are graceful and crumbling, and palm trees and huge spreading live oaks line the avenues, which still retain their French names.

Highlights for me were numerous. Willie Cole opened the conference with a keynote speech about his artistic practice which involves a method of mark making with a hot iron which he calls scorching, which in effect is a type of printed mark. His work was beautiful and playful, taking photographs of irons and making them into mask like faces, or using the ironed marks to make huge figure composites.

There was a great exhibition of prints by David Dreisbach, who was awarded the printmaker emeritus prize by the Southern Graphics council this year, in the Contemporary Arts Center.

I marveled at his narrative and compositional strength, all while tucking into perhaps the most delicious spread of food ever seen at a private view before. Appreciating art must be hungry work, seeing how much they’d laid out.

There were inspiring, ambitious and fantastic demonstrations especially the rubber stamp one by Sukha Worob who showed us how he cuts into foam board with a router set to 1/4″ depth and then fills the mould with a solution of silicone rubber composite called “Mold Max”

and some great silkscreen prints printed by Ernest Milsted with wallpaper paste and water soluble dyes in place of the traditional acrylics and medium, producing lovely prints all at a fraction of the cost.

There were some very impressive satellite events. I particularly liked Dirk Hagen’s broadside text speak haikus which he’d printed on letterpress and cardboard.

A lovely show of prints about New Orleans and the floods in the hippily named Healing Centre.

A nice set of prints in various portfolios were displayed in the hotel conference venue on grey pinboards and rotated daily; some of these were delicate and beautiful.

Also Midwest Pressed had a great show of silkscreen monoprints which were installed as a huge panel of floating heads of famous figures, skulls or Chewbacca.

This is my friend Brian Lane, from Seattle, who looks  a bit like Chewie.

Most notable for me was the Carnival of Ink set in an old ironworks factory to the east of the main town. This was a riot of printmaking activity.

Drive-by-press  printed T-shirts with skateboards (just inked up and jammed through the press with a foam blanket).

The main event was run by Wolfbat Press, and involved hundreds of artists who spent the week of the conference decorating box cars with collaged prints which were paraded them through the town on St Patrick’s day before setting them on fire.

Several studios ran various fun fair style games such as “Wrassle a printmaker and win a print for a dollar” which had me in fits of laughter.

I presented a paper on movement in print in the International panel which got some good feedback, if you would like to read the article then please go this page here,

then showed the animations Shift and Lucid Mask, along with a selection of prints at the open portfolio session,

which was a great time to meet other printmakers whose work I admire

Like Ben Moreau’s gorgeous etchings

Some print genius Marcus Benavides

Michael Barnes

Mark Bovey

And oh so many more…!

 

New Orleans for SGCI conference

I’m off to New Orleans for the Southern Graphics conference. Will be talking about movement on Thursday 15th March, as part of the international panel, and showing my latest work and animations. I’m sure I will come back a confirmed printmaking geek…

 

Time Slice project with Angus Leadley-Brown

For leap year, and in particular, leap day, I wanted to make a leap in time.

Last year’s dancing sequences were partly about celebrating this transient moments of weightlessness, so it was appropriate to team up with photographer, Angus Leadley-Brown who has developed an impressive circular bank of cameras to recreate what feels like being in the matrix- flying and frozen in motion.

We did the shoot in Stoke Newington Library, and there is a video of the set up of the cameras, which took 5 hours, and the final jumps, all here

And for the movie of the jumps themselves, without the previous set up, please go to this link http://youtu.be/dLTf87qcAjA