I had an interim exhibition in February on the same day of my dissertation hand in, from left to right the work the titles included were Patrick Hughes Lilliput Collection, Northumberland Sketchbook, Richard Prince Photobooks & Offprints from the Warburg Institute
The Warburg Institute provided me with a research environment the first sketches I did there were folklore books in brown packing ontop of a cabinet which was further developed into an oil sketch. I am currently painting ‘offprints’ which was completed for the interim show. Prince photo-books was completed for my dissertation.
The research is branching into over-information, as I look yet further into the history of books I am discovering more interesting places to visit in London. Often these visits take a lot of pre-organizing if the books are to be handled and often enough I can get lost in information on the internet. Visual arrangements are sometimes found by chance, suggesting weighty fields of knowledge. I am still working on a large painting of a shelf in the Warburg Institute and the themes of book collecting inspired following my etchings of a unique filing cabinet in Warburg’s photography collection. The theme collecting goes well beyond Warburg’s lifespan and interestingly has taken on a life of its own.
I painted Soane’s last 3 surviving pocket books that comprised details of his trips to Italy. I had read somewhere that it is possible to learn architecture from 3 books, only no-one knows which ones. I was trying to think about being responsible for your own interests. At the heart of this research these images relate to the idea of the self as it is revealed through the ‘stuff’ we collect and how this is then translated into the visual plane of painting.
Having made a painting of my vinyl collection I started in London by making a series of works based on vintage books, paperbacks, dairies and travel guides that I have collected over the years. Making use of oil & acrylics I am interested in how these collections relate to ideas around the spectacle, mass culture, the self and the contemporary notion of an excess of information.
My Fine Art Degree properly got underway at Wimbledon School of Art in September 2008. My journey up to that point charted a combination of part-time diplomas in North East institutions, then onto a Foundation degree in Fine Art Practice which opened the door to the regular Fine Art Degree and enabled a transfer to join Wimbledon on a part-time basis with their Second Year students.
I am currently in my third and final year at Wimbledon and the transition from part to full time has been a real blessing allowing me to focus entirely on my practice which is situated within a personal obsessional world of collections and collecting. I am interested in the close-to-home hobby arena of reading and listening to music, not only in the atmosphere which these activities engender but also in their signifiers, notably piles and archives.
