Artist Research

Having relocated from South Wales to Yorkshire over two weeks ago I have be searching for connections. Communication is an essential element to moving from your family and the known to the unfamiliar and almost foreign. Whilst at Swansea Metropolitan University one of our tutors was Tim Davies who often uses postcards in his work. The artist's work above is not that of Tim Davies but reminded me of his work. However, rather than using other people's postcards and correspondents I would prefer to engage in my own. Contemporary communications prose a problem however. Facebook, e-mail, texts etc. remove the need for the physicality of ojects such as letters and postcards. Do I ebrace the new technology or revert to the traditions of the past in order to attain pieces I can document?

Jesse Treece:

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Jesse Treece is a collage artist living in Seattle, Wa whose work screams of the simple, yet ever complex, interpretations of both the mundane and whimsical facets of life. He’s somehow managed to mix both the regular and absurd, beautiful and disturbing and put them into images that you find you could get lost in for hours. His tools of the trade include scissors, glue and vintage magazines/books.

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Map Research

Website

Shannon Rankin:

Website

Boston Map Artwork by Studio KMO

Close-up

Website

David Hepher

Study for Wansworth Road Estate IV 2006
Camberwell Flats by Night 1983

Breughel's Tower (Diptych) 2004

"David Hepher's large-scale paintings, using concrete and photographic vinyl along with more conventional acrylic, convey the grids, textures and graffiti of a high-rise housing estate with great immediacy. Based on the Brandon Estate in the Borough of Southwark, they are at Flowers East, 199-205 Richmond Road, London E8."

Source

"he has always painted buildings, David Hepher thinks of himself as a landscape artist. It just happens that buildings comprise most of the landscape he paints. He has a particular fondness for the better tower blocks of the 1960s, even when they are weathered with graffiti; and he singles out a group on the Wyndham Comber Estate near Camberwell Green in South London, 'built like a pile of bricks ... very chunky and squarish, a happy mix of brick and concrete'."

Source

At university I attended a lecture and private tutorial by David Hepher and found him fascinating. His direct use of concrete on the canvas was inpsiring as it refers directly to the building material he is predominantly depicting. The multifareous layers engage the viewer along with the oscilation between expressive texture and graffiti and the precise, almost photographic, painting.

Susan Stockwell

Made from used coffee machine filters.
Made from rubber derived from Africa.

Made from computer components - recycled. The simple use of line is very appealing.

A Stitched blanket.

The project involved Susan worked with people from Lambeth Recycling Department, local volunteers and artists and together they made a quilt from discarded materials. The exhibition also contains a quilt she made about Florence’s life and travels using old £10 notes with pictures of Florence on them as the centre piece, a quilt made by inmates from Wandsworth Prison about Florence and the Crimea and a quilt lent by a private collector, made from Florence Nightingale Nurses uniforms.

Website

She is a contemporary British artist. Her work addresses themes of technology, ecology, politics, identity and migration using her trademark motifs of recycled computer components and other everyday materials.

Map Art

Website

Simon Elvins

Website

Silent LondonBlind embossed etching - 735x500mm - Edition of 10
Using information the government has collected on noise levels within London, a map has been plotted of the capitals most silent spaces. The map intends to reveal a hidden landscape of quiet spaces and shows an alternate side of the city that would normally go unnoticed.

Peter Dykhuis

Website

Peter Dykhuis uses mapping throughout his work.

Social, geographical, linguistically, radar etc.

Maps, flags and state symbols abound in Peter Dykhuis’s art: “You Are Here” superimposes a map of Halifax on envelopes; “Radar Paintings” uses airport radar images; “World View: The G7 Suite” encloses maps from each country within their respective flags. Dykhuis wrote to say this about his site: “This site is an overview of artwork that explores the graphic, social and political contexts of maps and map-making in contemporary culture. Of major interest is the overlap between fixed, analog, paper-based maps and the fluid domain of digital mapping courtesy of satellite systems and 24/7 computer-based viewing.”

BIO

Website

Typographic Maps accurately depict the streets and highways, parks, neighborhoods, coastlines, and physical features of the city using nothing but type. By weaving together thousands of words, a full picture of the city emerges. Every letter was carefully placed, taking hundreds of hours to complete for each map.

There is an engaging beauty about the use of words instead of conventional line.

Armelle Caron

The image above fascinates me; the artist has mad a graphic map of Tamarac [LA] but next to it she has then broken down the components that makes a map. Each gren shape has been lined up to create a patter. She has done this with a number of cities e.g. Belin, New York. It is very interesting to see how these cities have all been created differently by viewing the pattern potential solely.

River Roots

[Detail] River Roots

The combination of the rivers stripped from a map and the extension of them in to a plant plays with the idea of macro & microcosms.

Website

French artist Armelle Caron uses maps in a couple of ways. First, have a look at her organized city maps, executed between 2005 and 2008, in which city blocks are taken apart and organized into neat rows. She does something similar with a world map in Le monde rangé, available as a poster.

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Eve Bailey

Eve Bailey’s recent drawings are, she says, “inspired by the similarities between the infrastructure systems of cities and the human anatomy. I am specifically interested by the organic nature of architectural renderings. The iconography used for urban planning intersects with some modes of representation in drawings of the human morphology. I love how interwoven grids echo muscle tissues. Patterns for buildings evoke cells. Lines and symbols for roads and bridges recall arteries and tendons.”

Website

Lesley Halliwell

Flying Carpet (Detail), 2010
Collaged envelopes.
Window View (detail) Collaged envelopes
12cm x 23cm x 2cm
Found and donated envelopes

The Unfolding (I) [Mini Star] Detail Collaged envelopes
17cm x 25cm x 2cm
Collaged found and donated envelopes

The Unfolding (I) [Large Star] Detail Collaged envelopes
17cm x 25cm x 2cm
Collaged found and donated envelopes
The Unfolding (I) [Large Star], 2010
Collaged envelopes.
The Unfolding (I) [Large Star] Detail Collaged envelopes
17cm x 25cm x 2cm
Collaged found and donated envelopes

Standard Life (detail), 2010
Collage.
Qui Docet In Doctrina (2010) detail 17 x 23 x 1.5 cms Found and donated envelopes
17cm x 23cm x 1.5cm
Found and donated envelopes

Standard Life (detail), 2010
Collage.
Standard Life (2010) 17 x 23 x 1.5 cms Found and donated envelopes
17cm x 23cm x 1.5cm
Found and donated envelopes

Standard Life (detail), 2010
Collage.
Standard Life (2010) 17 x 23 x 1.5 cms Found and donated envelopes
17cm x 23cm x 1.5cm
Found and donated envelopes


AXIS

Website

"Lesley Halliwell is perhaps best known for her enormous Spirograph drawings made using a simple and cheap childs Spirograph kit and biro pens from a high street stationers. She is interested in repetition, pattern, geometry, popular culture, process art and the enduring tension that lies between chaos and control.
The Alice-in-Wonderland scale transforms the Spirograph motif from something familiar into works with a contemporary sensibility. Like sophisticated graffiti the Mandala-like tonal drawings impose themselves on the viewer and in the space while their playfulness belies the obsessive and focused application needed for their execution."

[From her Website]

I came across her work in the Oriel Davies Exhibition Lines of Desire but am fascinated by the simple yet effective use of envelopes.

Eskild Beck

Website

I saw Eskild Beck's work at the Oriel Davies' exhibition "Line of Desire".

Nikki Rosato

Website

She creates human forms by cutting away at maps, leaving only roads and rivers behind. Here’s her artist statement:

"Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and they hold the stories that haunt and mold our lives. The lines on a road map are beautifully similar to the lines that cover the surface of the human body.

In my most recent work involving maps, as I remove the landmasses from the silhouetted individuals I am further removing the figure’s identity, and what remains is a delicate skin-like structure. Through this process, specific individuals become ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like, similar to the memories they represent"

Stephanie Tuckwell

Website

"My work is a response to movement through the landscape. It may be glimpses from a train, a view from a mountain top or being airborne in a glider. I seek to arrive at an image that is a distillation of the experience of being present in the world at a particular moment. Through a shifting focus and observations of the landscape, I interpret the land, air and spaces in between. I want to evoke and atomosphere of contemplation and guide the onlooker to breathe the air and find his or her own resting place before moving on.

For me drawing and painting is an activity analogous to music. I orchestrate fluid, sensory explorations of materials, graphite, charcoal, ink and gesso with the more static graphic language of sogn and symbol. Using veils of paint, I create grounds and forms over which arrangements of marks dance across the surface and give a sense of time unfolding."

Stephanie Tuckwell