Walker Interview and Midway Process

I've been interviewed by Ryan G. Nelson for the Walker Art Center Design blog, here. The structure and tone set by Ryan made for something I was very happy to do. It's not so common to have such detailing and empathy in the questions asked, which helped me greatly to synthesise the working thinking as a whole and realise that the portfolio site needs a serious edit and overhaul. A lump of work I now need to leave behind.

These studies, ongoing; post-Hand Werk manipulations. A second edition will come in the next couple of months, this time distributed to order. News to come; thankyou if you have enquired). Looking at marriages between found (preserved) and made. There is some background thought on taxonomy, in mind since a trip last year to the adjoining Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. We spoke to both curators, who made clear the contradictory systems of each collection, cheek-to-cheek.

Any system of classification or any hierarchy may be unhelpful to express in writing, directly.

Paul Elliman consistently (as in, every read is a scalesfallingfromtheeyes incident) finds a way to use writing as something like a score. So his articles in any context always feel like artworks. This is Batia Suter's Parallel Encyclopedia (2007), by Roma Publications. He says, in accompaniment, "I pass. like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech".

My challenge often is to shed a pictorial, illustrative attitude when grouping objects. But the housing of found and made, clean and soiled within a box or dish is certainly shaking my drawing, in the set terms of representation and compatible forms within one rectangle.

Gelb (see interview), still in development, has been affected. As has an image to be finished this week for Landfill Editions, based on the V&A's Gilbert Collection of snuff boxes, bonbonièrres, toilet services and drinking vessels. Will post on this next week.

Also cutting plates to ink and print on the relief press for the all-too-imminent Open House Dulwich Festival event, starting next weekend. Will welcome some on-the-press decision making using this and other intercompatible plates, for some small editioned prints.