UNDER UMBRELLA CLOUDS SERIES [LITTLE PINK ELEPHANTS AND TWO OLD TARTS |
PEN AND ARCHIVAL PRINT ON OFFENBACH BIBLE PAPER |
2014 - NOW
The selected works shown are from Under Umbrella Clouds [2012-NOW], a series of works incorporating pen and archival print, all are produced on either Offenbach Bible Paper or Newsprint. The series of A3 works draw upon multiple and disparate reference points across both cartoon character and English individual. Incorporating both text and motifs, the characters sit or float in illustrative landscapes, surrounded by their idiosyncratic oddities.
UNDER UMBRELLA CLOUDS SERIES [LOOT] |
PEN AND ARCHIVAL PRINT ON OFFENBACH BIBLE PAPER |
2014 - NOW
LOOT and MOVE were shown in the exhibition Live In Your Dreams! at The Crypt of St Pancras Church [London, UK.], curated by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro.
In his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard put forth the crypt as the foremost metaphor for the space of our darkest fantasies and strangest reveries, tying the unconscious to the poetry of depth. The exhibition Live In Your Dreams! invites the participating artists to reimagine the Crypt of St Pancras Church as the site of a collective dream. As much as the metropolitan aboveground resembles a restless subject obsessed with rational efficacy and unfaltering productivity, this subterranean vault, built in 1822 and concealed under one of the busiest neighbourhoods of London, makes room for irrationality and imagination, reversing the order of above.
Responding to the image of the oneiric depth, participants have appropriated the place to fill it with dreams, which they represent in their diverse languages – painting, illustration, sculpture, installation, sound, photography, video, music, writing, neurobiology and performance. Ranging from raw extract of dream-memories to lateral analysis of the unconscious process, the variety of strategies reflects a manifold relationship between dreaming and artistic practice. Some of the artists celebrate the immediate newness produced by the protean forces dear to the Surrealists, and open the fields of phantasmagoria, nightmare, day-dreaming and hallucination. Others address art’s attempt to translate and archive the elusive and fleeting substance of dreams – those of the I, of the Other, or shared across the social sphere.
By engaging with the many ways dreams nurture artistic work, this exhibition aims to explore the artist’s status as a dreamer, a poet, an analyst, a visionary, a loony. It hopes to show that the dialogue between art and unconscious remains a playful and inexhaustible terrain. The two works were shown alongside Andy Flett's Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me.
Images and Text courtesy of Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro.