Youtube screen printing project at Hotbed Press.

I have been working since December 2011 on a series of new large scale screen prints in an Arts Council England funded project. I am teaming up with curator Poppy Bowers to show these works in a solo exhibition in 2013. To date I have produced 3 works, two of the prints I have just made will be shown in the Crossley Gallery for the exhibition Digital Romantics. I have a studio at Hotbed Press in Salford and work in the Press printing large scale. The unusual aspect to these works is the way that they are exposed. This is with a normal digital projector. It takes many tests per print to achieve the exact colour balance and the intricacies of working on such a large scale throw up many problems. Not just the fact that it takes two people to carry the screen! Here are a selection of images which show myself and Ivan Liotchev working in the studios at Hotbed.

Exposing with a digital projector.

 working on the large screen bed.

checking out the print at the Yellow and Magenta stage.

You Tube Screen Printing project

Thanks to the Arts Council England I have just had news that I have been awarded a grant to print a series of large-scale screen-prints which are screen grabs of Youtube birth videos.  I will be working at Hotbed Press in Salford where I have a studio to make the series of 7 works.

Раждане с оргазъм (Birth by orgasm) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbp3iff5OOc&feature=related 

Four-colour screen-print on Fabriano paper   101 x 147 cm   2011 

Edition of 3 

Раждане с оргазъм (Birth by orgasm) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbp3iff5OOc&feature=related 

Detail of four-colour screen-print on Fabriano paper   101 x 147 cm   2011 

Edition of 3 

Раждане с оргазъм (Birth by orgasm) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbp3iff5OOc&feature=related 

Detail of four-colour screen-print on Fabriano paper   101 x 147 cm   2011 

Edition of 3

The first exhibition of this work will be in February of 2012 for the Digital Romantics show at the Dean Clough Gallery curated by David Hancock. You can see the initial print which I made in July 2011 working with Ivan Liotchev to develop a way of exposing the image using a digital projector. This project is also supported by Screen Stretch and Screen Tec and Turners Art Materials 

Crossley Gallery Dean Clough Halifax.

Digital Romantics

With: Iain Andrews, Andrew Brooks, Clare Booker, darkcorner (Simon Woolham), David Hancock, Ian Kirkpatrick & Julien Masson, Helen Knowles, James Moore, Tom Ormond, Kari Stewart.

Stunning landscapes, moody urban dystopias, costumed fantasies and ecstatic tableaux: but just because there’s a computer chip involved in all of them, doesn’t mean that what Coleridge had to say about the imagination, or Burke about the sublime, or Carlyle about heroes doesn’t apply. The widely admired painter and curator David Hancock has brought together ten artists from around the UK for this unique exhibition of paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures – all of which manifest Romantic obsessions in a digital world. These are artists who pose as many challenges to the self-regarding (and self-rewarding) avant-garde as they do to the vaunted sensibilities of traditional ‘art lovers’; but in their acknowledgement of digital consumerism their scrutiny of contemporary life is perhaps more urgent than either group cares to admit.

Switzerland- Trelex Residency

Accompanying Ivan Liotchev who is part of Emotion Driven Process Based Parallel Identities http://edpbpi.tumblr.com/ to Switzerland to check out Nina Rodin's Trelex residency space, deliver a painting and make some marker drawings.

This canvas is back in Manchester at present and being worked on in my living room!

The Trelex Residency is an amazing resource for artists who need time and space to carry out ideas. There is a large living space and studio which can accommodate two artists at a time. It is in the small village of Trelex which is just 45 minutes from Geneva.

2 colour screen-prints on fabriano paper. 63 x 63 cm. 2011.

Why does the ecstatic image of a woman’s face, exhaling and reclining in what could be a screen grab from a porn film become significant when you realise it is actually appropriated from YouTube, posted by the woman herself, as a record of her birth? The intimate narrative of birth played out on the internet is of course ‘family viewing’ and yet it opens up the taboo yet undeniable link between sex and birth challenging the separation between women as mothers and women as sexual entities.

Drawing From Birth

Helen Knowles Incised book. 2010

Alongside the Mary Kelly Education programme @ The Whitworth Art Gallery http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/marykelly/ I ran a series of collaborative interdisciplinary workshops with 8 members of the public to explore the visual representation of childbirth. These began on Thursday March 3rd in the Worthington Room in The Whitworth Art Gallery.

The group was a mixed bunch of artists and non-artists with an interest in the subject matter either through their own personal experiences of childbirth or just as something to explore. We worked from You Tube videos, and old and new images of birth found in books magazines and pamplets. Through drawing, screenprint and new media we have created imagery and screenprints We will also work with collage inspired by my own personal interest in this medium from running Collage Night http://www.facebook.com/pages/collage-night/177929039388

This Blog will be updated with imagery, words and ideas over the course of the next 6 weeks.

To view the blog go to http://drawingfrombirth.blogspot.com/

Check out the new blog I have created for a project run by the House of Illustration http://www.houseofillustration.org.uk/ I worked on in January and February 2011. Working at St Clement Danes C of E primary school. The project was called Picture it: Inspiration through Illustration http://inspirationthroughillustration.blogspot.com/

'Basf Tower and Labouring Women'. 2010 Screen print on Fabriano paper, variable edition. 140cm x 160cm



'Basf Tower and Labouring Women'. 2010 Screen print on Fabriano paper, variable edition. 140cm x 160cm.

After London

Survival shelter built for the show after London to house the archive!
After London - How we learnt to survive
4.11.10 - 21.11.10

Sassoon Gallery
213 Blenheim Grove
London
SE15 4QL

http://www.thesassoongallery.co.uk/index.php?/projects/news/

After London: How we learnt to survive is an investigation into how we might survive at the end of the world. Taking an imagined apocalypse as its starting point, Sisters Burn have collected advice, thoughts, musings and more abstracted reflections on how we could survive when everything is gone. The project will be centered around a community- generated ‘apocalypse library’, where visitors will be able to digest an archive of information related to the idea, housed in a survival shelter desinged and built by artists Jaimie Barker and Chris King along with architect James Binning.

After London is set to be a fascinanting, educational, collaborative arts project concieved by curating collective Sisters Burn. The project is the next in a series of experimental exhibitions taking place at Sassoon Gallery in Peckham. The exhibition will open on the 4th of November with event weekends occuring throughout the month.


Ecstatic Labour 2010. Hand screen printed pamphlet. Edition of 100. Available in Donlon Books http://www.donlonbooks.co.uk/ and http://www.bookartbookshop.com/docs/opening.htm in Hoxton in London, Grotto http://grotto.manchesterscreenprinters.com/ in Manchester. Also on sale in www.koenigbooks.co.uk at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Ecstatic Labour 2010. Hand screen printed pamphlet comprising of images of womens faces in ecstatic labour for the exhibition.



In the survival shelter. 'Ecstatic Birth' is on display top center.

New Prints

In the studio at Hotbed press in Salford.

'Stolen image'. Screen print on fabriano cartridge paper. 150cm x 150cm. 2010

'Manu and Chandrika I', Screen print on fabriano paper. 140cm x 100cm. 2010.

'Manu and Chandrika II', Screenprint on fabriano. 140cm x 100cm. 2010

'Temple'. Screen print on fabriano paper. 200cm x 140 cm. 2010

'Temple'. Screen print on fabriano paper. 200cm x 140 cm. 2010

Drawing Laboratory - Gatley Primary School

In January 2010 I was commissioned by Creative partnerships to work in collaboration with Matt Cahill to take up a residency within the school.It was very open as to how we might engage with the curriculum teams to facilitate a creative learning process. Working two days a week for a six month period, Matt and I decided that it was each of our drawing practices which was a ready subject for collaboration. We came upon the idea of creating a drawing laboratory, a space in which the children could explore and investigate subjects that they were working on in the classrooms.

The process began organically whereby we led some workshops in the classroom to enable the children to begin to produce imagery -using mono- printing techniques we started with the theme of dinosaur.
Matt led a workshop on expressive mark - making and that is where it took off.

We had a small empty room in the school in which to work and this was our base. We brought the children in to use the source material they had already generated.

They used their own and others drawings. Collaging, photo-copying, overdrawing, over- printing, they instigated and decided where and how images were put together.

They made connections on all levels, thematic, technical and intuitive. Drawings inspired drawings, imagery generated new imagery.

Curriculum themes explored were poilitical art - The Murals of Derry, healthy eating, trees, web camera on a bird box which fell under maths, literacy, humanities, science.

Once the initial installation was finished we began all over again. This time however, using snippets of selected imagery to create large screens for screen printing.

We wallpapered the walls with the help of year 6 top set maths who did the important job of measuring out the paper to recover the walls.

An important question which floated in and out of our heads was this: Who does imagery belong to? Can we be sole authors and does it matter if we appropriate images? The children themselves asked these questions. The head of the woman above began as a small doodle by a year six girl called Maria, it was then taken on by a year 2 boy ( pictured above ) who photocopied it and enlarged it and stuck these part together. This was then made into a screen which was printed as a pattern, see below.

We taught the pupils how to screen print. They experimented playing with shape and texture, over laying prints, trying out different compositions.

Space changes with powerful screen printed images.

Finally we brought the teachers into the space and facilitated them to respond to the installation. This was so that they could then go on with their year groups to work inot the prints and drawings and continually develop the space whilst enabling them use it a resource to explore new topics.