February 7, 2013
My stop-frame animation, Costanza , with music by Baron Mordant, has been selected for the 9th Berlin International Director’s Lounge, and will be screened on Monday 11th Feb at 8.30 pm. I wish I could go, as the programme looks full of exciting short films. Click on the following link to view the animation on youtube.
February 1, 2013
Feb 2nd, 12-2 pm
January 22, 2013
You are cordially invited to join me for the closing event for Beyond the Moon show in the School of Art Gallery and Museum, Aberystwyth, on Saturday 2nd Feb from 12-2pm.
I’ll be signing a special exhibition copy of the catalogue, and there will be new music composed in response to the prints, which will be playing without human intervention on the grand piano in the centre of the room.
For more information or to RSVP please contact the curator, Neil Holland, on neh@aber.ac.uk
Would be wonderful if you could make it!
January 10, 2013
January 8, 2013
I’ve got a few things lined up for the first months of this year…
Andrew McPherson, the inventor of the magnetic resonator piano, is planning to create more sounds that respond to the work on the wall, and we shall have a closing event on the 1st and 2nd of February. There will also be new beautiful limited edition 32 page catalogue available to purchase for £10 (please contact me if you would like a copy of your own).
November 29, 2012
One day, when they’ve made a teletransporter that doesn’t scramble you into a million pieces when you get reassembled, I’ll be able to invite everyone to visit my show, even if they live a million miles away… In the meantime, here’s some photos and a video. The weird cracking noise on the video is my knee- too much jumping around on concrete I think! I absolutely love the sound of the piano which transformed the space into a performance venue and changed the viewing of the work into a piece of drama.
Click on this picture below to view a video we made of the show, with the piano playing on its own.
And here’s a picture of me looking pleased!
November 23, 2012
I know the opening is … hmmm, less than a few hours away… and the work is not all up yet, but here is a sneak preview!
I’ve got some forest prints on two sets of glass doors on the way to the gallery, and forest prints beyond so the effect is very much a procession into a different tangled place. This is a prototype of the installation.
The forest prints were a bit large for the space so we had to improvise a way of hanging them
Here are the boys, from left, Ben, Tom and Phil, helping hang a tree.
The Mask prints fit nicely in a row at the far end of the gallery
Here is Neil Holland, curator of the school of art gallery, putting up the Lucid Mask prints
and Andrew McPherson installing his amazing magnetic resonator device in the grand piano. (We’ve decided that magnetic resonator piano was a mouthful and that it should be called a g-string device instead!)
Just have to get the rest of the stuff up before this evening…
November 5, 2012
In Ariosto’s epic poem “Orlando Furioso” from 1516, the moon is portrayed as a place where all things wasted on earth are kept and treasured: emotions and unreclaimable objects such as misspent time and carelessly managed wealth, unanswered prayers, broken promises, and unfulfilled desires and intentions.
From 23rd November to 8th February, I’ll be having a solo show of prints and animations in the Aberystwyth School of Art Gallery called Beyond the Moon. In this show, the way to the moon is paved by sleeping figures, and the disjuncture signified by a walk through a forest of endlessly repeating trees. This moon is full of ghostly presences, dream-like narratives and unclassifiable emotions.
Three animations: Lucid Mask, Shift and Costanza will be playing; and on the walls the masks will float and empty dresses will dance. To add to the atmosphere there will be a sound installation by Andrew McPherson involving electromagnets acting on the grand piano which is in the centre of the gallery. His proposed Magnetic Resonator Piano (MRP) creates notes that evolve continuously in time, including tones with indefinite sustain, crescendos from silence, pitch bends, harmonics and new timbres. For this show, the MRP will play continuously without a pianist, generating ever-shifting harmonies and timbres.
The opening party is the 23rd November, and I shall try to schedule a closing event too, sometime in late January. I know it is very far away, but it will be worth a visit!
May 7, 2012
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!
May 1, 2012
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.
