Exhibitions 2012 - 2019

Highgate Watercolour Group

Annual Exhibition

30 October - 26 November 2019

Lauderdale House, Waterlow Park, Highgate, N6 5HG

This group exhibition takes place in historic Lauderdale House set in the beautiful grounds of Waterlow Park, Highgate.

In 'Glass Vase', 'River Estuary' and 'Waterlow Park' I follow my usual watercolour technique, layering water and pigment to represent the organic elements of vegetation, water and skies.  However, also included is an architectural piece showing the original building entitled 'The Institute of Painters in Water Colours'.  This still exists in Piccadilly and is now home to BAFTA.

Saint Pancras Community Association

Commission and exhibition

3 August 2018 - 29 January 2020

Saint Pancras Community Centre, Plender Street, London, NW1 0LB

'Chosen by the People'

The collages explore the lines and angles of architectural forms, combining areas of coloured papers with sections of digital prints.  In other works, watercolour paints are used to represent the natural fluidity found in plants, waters and the sky.

Devonshire Collective Postcard Exhibition

7 April - 16 April, 2018, DC!, Seaside Road, Eastbourne

‘Sections’, 5 screen-prints

An open group exhibition.

Flapjacks Café and Gallery exhibition

10 April - 10 May, 2017, 315 Kentish Town Road, NW5 2TJ, London

‘Shape and Form’, 11 screen-prints

A solo exhibition of screen prints representing interior and external features of buildings from London, Sussex, Berlin and Glasgow.

"The problem of colour is often its unreliability, its seeming randomness and its apparent autonomy.  While almost always connected to objects […] colour nevertheless doesn’t seem to quite belong to these objects.  The visual experience of colour cannot be verified by the other senses." 

David Batchelor (2008) Colour, Documents of Contemporary Art, pp.19-20.

"Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are." 

Gaston Bachelard (1994) The Poetics of Space, p. 7.

Flapjacks Café and Gallery group exhibition

10 March - 10 April, 2017, 315 Kentish Town Road, NW5 2TJ, London

‘Line and Colour’, 7 digital prints

Looking out from an upper floor window in Kentish Town, I noticed how elements of the building I was in were reflected in windows of the building across the street.  Photographs revealed patterns and shapes in the reflections and enlarging sections of the photographs enhanced the images’ mysterious abstract qualities.

"There is a multiplicity of individual representations of reality which differ according to different frames of reference, values, fantasies, anxieties and desires."

Aidan Day (1998) Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, p. 71

South Pancras Community Association commission and exhibition

Installed 19 December 2016, South Pancras Community Centre, Plender Street, London.

‘Four Screen Prints of Architecture’

Two of the four screenprints represent places of local Camden interest.  ‘Under the Bridge’ developed from a series of photographs taken from beneath the overground line where it crosses St Pancras Way, a potential site for London’s answer to New York’s Highline.  Sunlight streaming through the sleepers forms a ‘zebra crossing’ of light on the road.  The second local print looks down the curving staircase at the British Museum.

Sunny Hill House commission and exhibition

Installed 3 February 2016, Middlesex University, London.

‘Nine Screen Prints of Architecture’

"Shapes are amenable to mathematic representation, but the essential nature of colours resists it; the one appears quantitative, the other qualitative."  

C L Hardin in David Bachelor (2008) Colour, Documents of Contemporary Art, p.185.

"You just have one material world to explain another material world and the gap in-between is the territory of meaning."  

Juan Munoz in Lynne Cooke & Juan Munoz (1999) Juan Munoz (Dia Centre for the Arts), p. 6.

Middlesex University Library commission and exhibition

Installed 3 February 2016, Middlesex University, London.

‘Seven Screen Prints of Architecture’

have we forgotten something?

3 - 9 September, 2015, The Grove, Middlesex University, London.

‘Experiencing and Representing Space’

Visitors are invited to meander down a corridor lit by windows on left and right. That historic wanderer, the flaneur, will come across a shaft of light illuminating the wall and floor before turning into a larger rectangular space.

Here, a skylight spills another blue light shaft that travels across the floor.  A sharply angular doorway suggests a way out into the room beyond.  Three smaller wooden doors add to the mystery of what lies beyond.

"Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors."

J. G. Ballard (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 22.

"Space then is a function of movement rather than of sight."  

Anish Kapoor (2008) Memory, p. 34.

 "An entire cosmos of the Half-open.  [...] How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect."  

Gaston Bachelard (1994) The Poetics of Space, p. 222.

Immeasurable

27 April – 7 May, 2015, Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London

Screen prints and MDF frames 60 x 35 cm x 3

This residency and group show was a wonderful opportunity to work in this historic part of the city, surrounded by famous institutions for culture and learning.  I decided to overcome the lack of natural light by making and installing some ‘windows’. I screen printed windows onto three aluminium panels and attached these to the backs of three MDF frames.  The completed windows were placed close to the ceiling to give the impression of a sliver of light coming into the gallery.

"Blue takes hold of the viewer at the extreme limit of visual perception."  

Julia Kristeva (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, p.

"But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead ends, one-way streets.  Too many possibilities indeed."

Susan Sontag (1992) in Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, p. 

I mapped the relative positions of the Goethe Institut, the Serpentine Gallery, the Science and the Victoria and Albert museums, using objects and enlarged photographic images to represent each one.  These were displayed with the map in a vitrine.

"To understand something is to understand the topography, to know how to chart it.  And to know how to get lost."

Susan Sontag (1992) in Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, p. 

 160 Years, Celebrated in 160 Art Works

5 December, 2014 to January, 2015, Working Men’s College

Details from screen prints, 15 x 21 cm x 3

A group exhibition of work by current students, staff and alumni of the Working Men’s College in Camden Town to mark the 160th anniversary of the institution.  Founded in 1854, the College ‘has a remarkable history as a centre for innovation and excellence in the visual arts.  Early supporters included distinguished artists and critics: John Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Burne Jones, Holman Hunt and Ford Maddox Brown.’  ‘An eccentric, eclectic and enormously fun exhibition.’ (Pernille Holm, curator)

I submitted three details from screen prints to meet the requirements for works to measure 15 x 21cm to add to the 157 other works.

"The problem is one of geometry, what do these slopes and planes mean."

J. G. Ballard (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 58.

 The Nest-Builders of the Sea

29 April to 3 May, 2014, Art Lacuna, Clapham

Paper, aluminium and steel, various dimensions

I took part with a collective of students on a MA Fine Art programme at Middlesex University at Art Lacuna.  The gallery is an artist-run space bordering on a social housing estate in Clapham.  In responding to the space, I created a work in one corner of the principal space.  This corner included angles and a shelf and I worked with the architecture and geometry to create an installation over abutting walls and the floor.

I used large-scale coloured photocopies of images from the Berlin Museum pasted onto the walls and floors to create an environment.  Aluminium and steel models of architectural features, also based on my visit to Berlin, were placed so that they could spill forwards from the corner to occupy a larger area.

"My work doesn’t occupy the whole exhibition space.  It occupies just a little bit of space, and the space that surrounds the work has the same importance as the space occupied by the object." 

Joseph Scanlon (1992) Miroslaw Balka, p. 182.

"Another dramatic feature…is formed by the window configurations, which radically penetrate through the walls.  These configurations are a topographical record – the writing of the walls."

Daniel Libeskind (2001) The Space of Encounter, p. 27.

 A Return to Order

July, 2013, Working Men’s College, Camden Town

Cotton, plaster and oil, w300 x d300 x h250 cm

Classical imagery is referenced when times are uncertain and people feel threatened.  Their desire for a return to order is reflected in films and art movements that have followed major conflicts.

In this large-scale installation, cotton hangings were soaked in plaster to form an irregular, pleated ‘screen’.  Monochrome images of life casts of heads were projected into the space.  Sections of the images ‘catch’ on different hangings so that the heads are fragmented.

"The very idea of order and meaning is itself a delusion."

Seamus Deane (1992) introducing James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. xix.

"A meaningless world inhabited by people desperate for meaning."

Kafka

 The Uncanny

July 2012, Working Men’s College, Camden Town

Photographic prints, net fabric, maquette, w100 x d300 x h150 cm

Influenced by Freud’s analysis of the uncanny, the installation combined photographic images of faces and bodies set against classical scenery.  Sections of the faces were lifted out and added as doubles of the main image.

One image was created as a frame so that the viewer could look through to a small maquette that reproduced the entire scene.

"Underneath this reality in which we all live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed."

Friedrich Nietzsche (2016) Writings of Nietzsche: Volume II, p. 21.

"Once more I hurried away, only to return there again by a different route.  I was now seized by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny."

Sigmund Freud (2003) The Uncanny, p. 144.

 The Space Between

July 2012, Working Men’s College, Camden Town

Photographic images, boxes, w40 x h30 x d6 cm x3

I explored my interest in the way in which a three dimensional scene can be collapsed into two dimensions through photography and then re-instated by using layers from the images.

"The lessons of the past and the dreams of the future.  Everything you need to know you have learnt through your journey." 

Paolo Coelho (1988) The Alchemist, p.132.