Last night a few of us got together in Commercial Union House to have a look inside each others studios.
Alannah Lamb, Nick Christie and myself shared our work – with Paul Jex, Helen McClafferty, Jennifer O’Neill and Melanie Kyles kindly pitching in with feedback.
Alannah Lamb showed us two video pieces from an ongoing series of moving portraits. The works are incredibly powerful.
Alannah is about to embark on her Foundation course and I’m amazed at the maturity of her work! You can see her photography here.
Jennifer O’Neill and Alannah work together running Praxis Gallery within Ampersands Inventions‘ space – on the 4th floor of Commercial Union House. Keep up to date with what’s happening on Praxis’s facebook here.
Ampersand Invention’s facebook is here for you to follow/like.
Nick Christie seems very drawn to the experimentation processes of printmaking – etching, linocuts, cyanotypes, collographs, monoprints, lithographs and every other printing technique you can think of. He has recently been exploring our relationships with smartphones, thinking about how we touch them and the traces we physically leave on their glass, these marks in turn revealing which app someone may have been using, which in turn reveals something of their desires and personalities. We all seemed drawn to some of his mistakes/tests as well as his more finished works. I was also enjoying the physical weight of some of his printing plates and admiring these as objects in their own right.
Nick has been involved with Northern Print and the 20:20 print exchange where each artist creates an edition of prints measuring 20x20cm and receives a box full of prints from other artists. With some of the editions going up for sale in exhibitions to help fund-raise. What a great idea.
I’m very much looking forward to working with Nick on testing some glass cyanotypes tomorrow. It is relatively complicated compared to just cyanotyping onto paper – involving mixing in gelatin and heating everything to exact temperatures to allow the chemicals to adhere to the glass. It’s a first for both of us and the science bit is always somewhat easier to grasp with two heads!
Kirsty Harris I showed the gang a finished film and one I had only started a few days ago. I’ve been thinking about the out takes from military footage and splicing together some pieces of film that cut away prior to the money shot. I want to include more of the increasingly frantic film-work of the cameramen while scanning the skies for the mushroom cloud, searching for the monster. www.kirstyharris.com
Keep tuned for following insights into Paul, Mel, Jennifer and Helen’s work.
