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/