I have been residing in St Johns' the Evangelist for about a year now and it has become the Bureau-Centre for the Arts. I am part of the CIC that runs the centre and now an unpaid Director of Art and the artist-in residence. We aim to bring art and music as well as dance and workshops to the old cotton town of Blackburn.
It has been quite a good process but now we have amenities to pay for, we need to put on more events and at the moment, the live events and club nights are the biggies...I need to get more art in to make some money.
I'm still making work. I feel it is more text/collage based though. I have been working with braille and simple words but would like to complete textural aphorisms that could be tread by the blind and look good as collage. I have used words such as the five senses and they look ok as stand alone art pieces.
For last months ArtSPACE we had a BBC initiative called Get Creative which is a year long project to get the arts pushed onto the community. We had a full day event with varied activities, I organised the much later event ART AUCTION. This was a rushed few weeks collecting work from local and regional artists. There was collage, sculpture, painting and photography. I selected a collage that I am working on called 'The Measure of Purity' which is a Malevich inspired piece based on social media and vacuous narcissism. A young guy bought my work which was nice. and quite ironic.
I have produce the second part of 'the first waves of nothing' which is titled 'to shoot the bore'. 'to shoot the bore' is produced as a pamphlet book which is displayed differently than the previous one but that could change. I have already sold a copy of the pamphlet/book and need to make some more for the Blackburn PrintFest.
Blackburn PrintFest is the focus of my attention at the minute. This is the first of its kind in Blackburn and I need to stock up on the pages of the book. The 'bore' book is still in it's editing phase though so I need to get typing quick to get to the endpoint. I do have an idea with some carbon paper that I have acquired though that I need to experiment with.
Pixel Lust II has just finished and I exhibited five framed 8-Bit Dot Matrix pencil studies but when the art sale came, I think my work was too expensive or just too complex for Blackburn. I feel like I'm wasting my time at the moment but I will persevere.
I'm in a strange position at the minute. My studio in Manchester has been condemned due to fire safety and general neglect and I have moved most of my things into the Bureau and been given a much larger space but I don't feel part of the Blackburn is Open thing. BiO is a initiative to get art into disused places but I seem to be sidelined several times and have to swim against the tide, which believe me is quite hard.
On the plus side, I have been given a good little Sony videocamera that Im going to use for my monologue videopiece based on 'the first waves of nothing'. The filming for this will start real soon and I think I might just have the right guy to perform it. Also Liz n' Lils, a little vintage tearoom in Blackburn, have shown me around their top floors and given the onus to film/photograph the place as I deem fit. Which is really good of them.
I have been playing with pictorial collage again and trying new techniques. My studio is full of clippings and this has kickstarted my 'Dead Rockstars' series. Together with taking over Blackburn Film Club and playing with collage, this is where I am at the moment.
