About me

I'm a trained and active Fine artist, but have also worked in the design industry as a Project Manager for 7 years. Previously to that I trained and worked as a Creative Artworker, so I have great Adobe skills as well as the usual Office skills required for PM work. Over the years I've been commissioned to write short critical texts for various exhibitions including one for a show of now Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price. I've also curated exhibitions and events - taking them from conception to realisation on very tight budgets. I have also been a visiting lecturer, at The Slade School of Fine Art and Greenwich University. I'm interested in opportunities that might overlap some of these areas, and that will stimulate, excite and challenge me.

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Projects

• The old one-twoMy latest video work, shown as part of Birth Rites exhibition, Media City UK, Salford.
• In its wakeCurated by myself and assisted by Natalie Saunders, In its wake was an exhibition and attached performance night presenting a group of artists whose works were activated by a subjective deliberation or reverie of hand, mind and material. The works were the testimony to a process, a grace of conscience, on which time has left its trace. They were not facsimiles, avatars or simulacra, but wakes. Conceived, curated, installed, and promoted by myself.
• Aberdeen Asset Management - Bulletin'Creative Artworking' which in this case meant liaising directly with the client to create each issue of the bank's magazine and updating fact sheets. From image searching and creating graphs and graphics, to pull-quotes and suggested edits to copy, I worked on this client for many years at the beginning of my career.
• Gravity Drawings SeriesRepresentation is often an attempt to use a short-hand to explain the world, whether through science, diagram, or myth. In the summer of 2005, I visited Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, Isaac Newton’s home, and was given apples from his infamous tree (root of gravity and a slapstick myth). The possibility of growing a bonsai from that tree is suggested in the resultant planned schematic drawings of an artform that has its own duration. The slapstick moment that signaled the Enlightenment era is commemorated in images of the potential control of the very natural process through which the mythical inspiration occurred.
• Panoramic Decelerator - Designer and copywriterPanoramic Decelerator was a solo show for Jim Hobbs. Greenwich University commissioned me to write an essay and design a format for the writing to accompany the exhibition. As a friend, it was a pleasure to write an intimate text about melancholy to reflect his work. Extract: "It is seven years since he and I were in Port Townsend, Washington together. “City of Dreams”, New Year, holed up with fellow artists in the warm heart of an American forest. It may be seven years to the day since we both got up before dawn, as we both still do today – now to walk dogs, then to make work. As I willed the sun to rise through a dawn vigil, he watched smoke rise, billow and break – smoke caused by paper-making; the smoke and mirrors of the creation of the tabula rasa. I was trying to forge the gold; he was watching its apparition sublimate and dissipate before his eyes. ... "Morning and mourning. Separated thinly by that ‘U’, the ‘U’ in ‘cruche’ that Ponge depicts, that makes the vessel what it is – “more hollow than hollowness… a hollow surrounded by a fragile earth; rough and easily cracked”. The morning horizon becomes the ultimate hollow through its missing you. You that is me, reflected back into the void as the sun fails to strike through the saturated skies. ... "The harshness of detail, of memory, is lost, burnt in and fogged over. Undefinable, a landscape becomes the landscape, the earth, resting on shifting ground. Landscape made by suns, winds, tectonic plates. Wars, fag butts and whiskey bottles. Beetles, and rabbits with mexamytosis. Everyday, and yet a mythic other. M-other (earth)." The full text is available on my website as below, as well as other commissioned writings under the section 'Other projects'.
• The Waste Land Trilogy - Parts I and IIThe Waste Land Trilogy is a series of three projects taking place in various newly defined exhibition spaces in London. The project seeks to interpret T S Eliot's The Waste Land through contemporary eyes. It is an amalgamation of different voices, each intimately echoing a movement within the poem, attempting to depict the soul of a sometimes vacant city full of fragile opulence, nervous masses, fading hope and malignant relationships. My role as co-curator has taken the project from conceptualisation to realisation. As well as curating, installing, editing the exhibitions, I was responsible for the creation of publicity material and social media, and negotiating to secure sites for each individual event. Parts I and II have been completed. Part III is in planning.

Work history

Commissioned Writer
Nov 2014 - Jan 2015
Untitled essay commissioned for the exhibition 'Panoramic Decelerator', Jim Hobbs.
Curator & Creative Director
Jan 2014 - Aug 2014
– Taking the exhibition from concept to execution. – Management of install. – Creation and maintenance of website, publicity material, social media. – Negotiation of use of space and budget with new exhibition sites.

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Skills

• Teaching
• Visual Arts
• Writing
• Print Design
• Retouching
• Drawing
• Sculpture
• Exhibition
• Video
• Client Services
• Design
• Production Management
• Project Management
• Proofreading
• Popular Culture

Education

Fine Art (media
Aug 2004 - Aug 2006
The Slade is an amazing art institution. The MA was an incredible course, taught by some of my heroes.
Visual Arts
Aug 1994 - Jun 1996

Awards

Artwork held in national collections
including Ernst and Young, and Hull Lift NHS.
MaxMara Art Prize - shortlisted
Shortlisted for the MaxMara Art Prize. In association with the Whitechapel Gallery.

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