I finished making this work mid November 2023, and had my son a couple of weeks later in Leeds General Infirmary. The gestation of my child and these paintings shared time.
Feeling into the shape of another
Hopkins at Hepworth and Housley in Sheffield
To Be Seen & Janus II
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Barbarians at the Gate - a Blackbird show on SuperRare
Barbarians at the Gate | September 8 – October 13, 2022
Blackbird on SuperRare
Blackbird works with contemporary artists who have a critical and thoughtful practise away from the world of digital art. Using the SuperRare Spaces platform, and the NFT or crypto art audience which that provides, artists are able to reimagine their work and take it in unexpected directions. In this fifth Blackbird show, the first as a SuperRare Space, four contemporary artists approach the worlds of digital animation and the enormous possibilities it allows.
"Working now in the world of NFTs, is a bit like being in at the start of vinyl and the 3-minute pop song. The experimentation and blue sky possibilities are incredibly exciting."
The expression 'barbarians at the gate' was used by the Romans to describe foreign attacks against their empire. It is now often used within a sarcastic, or ironic context, when speaking about a perceived threat from a rival group of people, often deemed to be less capable or somehow primitive.
Blackbird understands that not even the most celebrated traditional contemporary artists will necessarily be successful in making the switch to a digitally native format, but we believe that these artists will make an incredibly valuable long-term contribution to crypto art and how it is seen in the future. They bring progressive and conceptually thoughtful work and there is a real excitement for this to be a forum for brilliant experimentation.
https://www.superrare.com/spaces/blackbird-contemporary-art-nft/gallery
JAMES SCOTT BROOKS / KATE STREET / MARKUS VATER / DOUGLAS WHITE
This series of animations by JAMES SCOTT BROOKS utilises the verbs from 1960’s folk songs that were attempting to encourage action and change in society and the environment. The artwork utilises nuanced footage and images that explores a relationship between nature and civilisation and the delicate balance between progress and detrimental change. In addition, the specific verbs have been aligned to system-based sound creativity intentionally developing a pertinent and melancholic folk rock instrumentation.
Verbs of a Folk Song II
KATE STREET presents her Celestial Bodies series. In astrological terms a celestial body is a single, tightly bound, contiguous entity. These silent floating entities each pertain to their own characteristics whilst talking of human relations, fetishism and otherness.
Symbiosis
Sometimes this is how life feels like: Living inside a large mouth, being carried around, in danger of being swallowed at any moment. But we make the best of this existential precarity, by using the tongue as a bouncy castle, together with someone we like. There is nothing better, than bouncing together.
Life
Triclops III
For information on how to purchase an NFT please click here for an explanatory Blog post.
Viewing Rooms on Greg Rook Advisory
Ansel Krut and Jem Finer on SuperRare
At 6pm on the 7th October, 2021, on the SuperRare NFT platform, Ansel Krut’s animation, Profile with Pipe, with music by Jem Finer, will go to auction. Following his celebrated 1000 year composition, Longplayer, Jem Finer has composed a 10 second piece of music for Ansel Krut’s animation. This is a unique collaboration between two beautifully idiosyncratic creative forces.
A lot of what I'm about to tell you is made up
Rachael House - Resistance Sustenance Protection
2021, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
Throughout lock down, as we were dealing with isolation and the extraordinary new circumstances, Rachael House was documenting her thoughts through almost daily drawings that she published on Instagram.
Launching on Friday 28th May is a book of those drawings - Resistance Sustenance Protection.
Resistance Sustenance Protection is a year of drawings - a pandemic record, an archive and a call for change.It reflects on the political and personal of the pandemic, locally and globally, addressing queer issues, mental health, daily walks and raging about government.
To coincide with the launch, Rachael and I have published 12 of those drawings as limited edition prints. 20% of the cost of each print will be donated to the Alzheimers Society, and the remaining 80% of one particular drawing, the viral ‘Wash your hands’, will be donated to The Good Law Project.
Wash your hands, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
“In April 2020, House posted a comic strip reading ‘However thoroughly you wash your hands, if you voted for this government – they will never be clean’ (9 April 2020, p.x). Each window of the four-square grid features a close-up of hands, washing. While the first three drawings refer to the government’s illustrated handwashing guidelines, the blemished palm in the final square refers to Lady Macbeth, the Shakespearean character whose ambition leads her to murder. Despite getting what she wants, she is ultimately driven to psychosis, unable to escape the vision of her bloodied hands. House’s drawing summed up our collective rage. It was shared by thousands.”
Rosie Cooper, Head of Exhibitions, De Le Warr Pavilion
Gaslight the nation, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm
“Rachael House is part of a transtemporal, feminist family of artists and makers whose work is a form of resistance. She revels in the space between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, making use of performance, comic strips and ceramics to address themes such as queerness, ageing, mental health and gender-based discrimination. Presented in galleries and museums, House’s art can also be found in places where it can get things done: in parks, nightclubs and in the streets…
Rachael House gives us space to think, feel, and act. Her work is an affirmation that being political can be fun, that anger must be a force for change, that we cannot do without solidarity, ever, and that by sharing experiences we might be able to free ourselves from the toxicity of shame and find compassion for ourselves and for those around us. And she reminds us that, whatever happens, we must smash the patriarchy.”
Rosie Cooper, Head of Exhibitions, De Le Warr Pavilion
Bottle tree, Giclee print on Archival paper, Edition of 25, 25 x 25cm