The Rye Society of Artists
Big news - At the end of April I was voted, by the current members, into the Rye Society of Artists. This was not something I expected to happen this year but I am delighted that I will be able to jump in and take part in shaping where the Society is heading in future. The opportunity for showing my work at least twice a year is a pretty big deal for someone like me in their early career, and to be honest the imposition of some structure with those exhibitions in mind is a very welcome addition to my routine.
A massive thank you to the members and non-members who have helped me get to this point!
Interviews
Off the back of my two shows in April I am able to share a pair of interviews about my work.
Arabella of ‘A Rye Good Time’ and Matt Forbes-Dale of ‘Ethel Loves Me’ talked to me about my Artist of the Month wall takeover at Ethel Loves Me on Rye High Street. Specifically I wanted to share a couple of extracts where I talk about the thinking behind my Disintegration Series.
My interview with Arabella - Scroll to 28th April, 13:17pm - a RYE good time
My interview with Matt - on Ethel Loves Me’s website
No Boundaries: Explaining the Disintegration Series
For quite some time I have worked alongside the idea that almost no object has an outline or an edge. My thinking on this is still young and needs to be better thought-out as I learn more but here is a summary of where the Disintegration Series is heading.
‘Kerala, rewilding’, 2018
Black holes must be an exception, I suppose, because maybe their event horizon could be called an edge of sorts? Once something falls into that horizon it cannot escape, whether it be matter or energy. All other objects are being torn apart by a relentless battery of radiation and friction. Living creatures are assemblages with the ability to renew damaged parts by eating or consuming external sources of energy and matter, but as we all know too well - it is a finite process.
Further to that is the complication of quantum physics so, forgive my level of knowledge on this subject (and the likely misuse of certain terms), but initially that means that the component pieces of atoms are both waveforms and particles at the same time depending upon the viewer or testers’ perspective. Therefore it is almost impossible to define the area of an atom on the outer ‘edge’ of an object. Secondly those quantum properties appear to imply that the pieces of an atom exist simultaneously in multiple places in the universe at the same time. If that is true then surely all objects can never be seen as stable individual forms but rather they should be seen as temporary reflections of another point in spacetime, a temporary concentration of vibrations.
My stippled pieces were always concerned with disintegration and decay, with nature reclaiming overtly human spaces, but since I stopped using drawn lines in those artworks it has become more important that unity is also part of what I am depicting. The compositions are designed to show the world as fragile but recognisable forms. You are supposed to be able to see the forms and understand how they relate to each other because they cannot exist alone. I am not trying to abstract forms beyond recognition.
‘A housing crisis (Crittenden’s Cottage), 2020
The Disintegration Series used to be purely monochrome because I enjoyed the feeling that I was mentally projecting colour into a scene. This idea works well when there are clear outlines to help the viewer interpret the composition, like the trailing foliage in ‘Kerala, rewilding’ but in a very complicated or busy piece it can be impossible to discern important details. The structure is lost in what looks like chaos.
I started to introduce colour as a unifying medium where a particularly stand-out detail would be lost otherwise, or when the real life source was scintillating. I chose to use watercolour pencils for the majority of the colouring because I did not want to accidentally allow a replacement form of outline into the series, paint would be too awkward to fade into nothing on paper. Instead I draw the colours and then use water and a brush break those marks apart. This can be seen in ‘A Housing Crisis’ and ‘Aesop, thwarted’ because I felt that the moss and lichen was so ethereal and vivid that the scene was dead without any added colour.
‘Anbid’, 2020
It was a wrench to use colour but ultimately it was the right choice. ‘Anbid’, by contrast, was a case where the composition did not need any colour because the structures, although diffused, would still invite the viewer to apply their experience to it and to hopefully see colour where there was none applied.
‘Aesop, thwarted’, 2021
The end point I continue to work towards is the annihilation of enclosed definite form, so that I can discuss with the viewer the scary concept of their relation to all energy and matter. For me that idea helps to focus and calm me down but I suspect it easily terrifies and appalls plenty of viewers.