Ghosts of exhibitions past and future

I’ve found lately that the challenge of maintaining this blog lately is not so much in the demands of a full-time occupation – rather, it’s in balancing that job with exhibition commitments inherited from my more flexible freelance days. When combined in recent months, the studio and the office achieved a critical mass that left little time for blogging, leisurely experiments in the kitchen, or even promoting those shows for which I’ve been feverishly drawing in my off hours.

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Case in point: the opening reception for Named Spaces, a group exhibition at Earls Court Gallery in which my work is included, took place nearly two weeks ago and I’m only getting around to mentioning it now – note to any student readers, this is not how it’s done. But the show is running until January 7th so anyone with an interest in certain of my bee-focused works might want to have a look.

More importantly, I found myself in excellent company with an unexpected array of works that loosely take the lived environment as their theme. Both Bill Schwarz and Brian Harvey take on the modest underside of built dwellings with a rich density of colour – the blue depths of Harvey’s shadows are also Yves Klein-ish in their intensity – while Randy Hryhorczuk enters more nebulous territory with abstract horizons that were among my favourite works. I was also drawn to the meticulous whimsy of Michelle Purchases’s intimate etchings of tree houses, and beyond impressed by the two fine craft artists who rounded out the exhibition. Christopher Reid Flock’s non-functional raku teapots push the limits of the medium with the appearance of a seductively crumbling beauty that is echoed in the visual disintegration and distressed copper of Silvia Taylor’s glass pieces. The interactions between the works selected by Earls Court curator Andrea Skelly are subtle but undeniably present, leaving a lot of room for personal exploration and interpretation.

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Detail from Mont-Saint-Michel: The Soaring Spirit of an Era, 2011. Watercolour pencil on book page.

A few days before Named Spaces wraps up, I will also be installing a solo project at Gallery on 4 for the month of January. The Fisher King will premiere a new series of book-based drawings that take a departure from honeybee extinction and instead insert forms of aquatic life into scenes of medieval Europe. The themes that have evolved from this project – sustainability of life, the tension between blind faith and critical questioning – bear a relationship to my last body of work on Colony Collapse Disorder, but drawing something apart from bees already feels like a refreshing change of pace.

And once that last show is done and dusted, I look forward to enjoying a somewhat manageable workload where studio research can unfold at a more gradual pace – months in which to digest the Bronte sisters is exactly what’s in order. Who knows, I might even have time to blog in 2012 – hope does prevail.


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