A sense of perspextive

If you are a regular here, you'll know that my ethos is to recycle, reuse, upcycle etc materials whenever I can. So, when I had an offcut of perspex from an old bus-stop shelter, I had to find a use for it. I don't have the kit to melt it into interesting shapes, and that's not my thing anyhow, but I do have power tools. This and a love of nature inspired the following, entitled 'Hard Rain'...

'Hard Rain' raindrops and ripples captured in perspex form - land art of a sort...

Looking through the ripples. The scuff-marks are part of its previous life as a bus-shelter and shall remain, and I hope that wherever it finds a home, it'll be hung as a panel through which to view, well, whatever lies beyond...

A portrait of the artist as a young pond.

Being an entomologist in my other life, I can't help but feel that this could be an insect's-eye view of the world from the water of a pond in the rain. Or a frog's-eye if you're feeling amphibian. However you look at it, I hope you like it - next stop = framing.

Artists as transducers

One of my recent ink drawings is entitled Terrain II and records a local bus journey over a few miles, the pen acting like a phonographic recording stylus, translating the bumps on the road into lines on the page.

Terrain II, A4 ink on paper

Obviously this isn't a strict or 'pure' record - I've chosen the line spacing and shading to turn the original lines into a visual landscape - but the shapes are derived directly from the movements of the bus/road. Along with Terrain (also a bus journey rendered similarly to this) these were my first forays into anything that could be considered 'land art', and were somewhat inspired by the Uncommon Ground land art exhibition when it came to Southampton City Gallery last year. One of the pieces that intrigued me, though not my 'favourite' and certainly not the most spectacular, was Roger Ackling's Five hour cloud drawing, made by focusing sunlight onto card using a magnifying glass moved regularly from point to point, back and forth over the card. This burns an image of the sunny and cloudy periods (fainter or unburnt areas) and therefore captures the light conditions at that particular place and time. An understated work of intense concentration and precision that presses my ink-drawing buttons.

Roger Ackling's Five hour cloud drawing

There are clear parallels here - though one uses bumps along a road, and the other changes in sunlight levels, they are both one-offs - recording that couldn't be repeated in another time or place. With this in mind, I was drawn to the Sound Matters exhibition currently at Solent University's Sir James Matthews Building as it explores ways of turning sound into other art and craft-forms. Most relevant here are probably Landscape and Weave Waves.

Landscape, by Max Eastley, uses a motor and magnets to create forms from tiny metal fragments on the surface of a horizontal painted canvas. So, magnetic fields turned into a record of their influence. Mmm... science...

Landscape, Max Eastley

Weave Waves by Scanner and Ismini Samanidou presents a textile depicting - in fine detail - the sound of their breaths, digitally recorded, then translated into instructions for a weaving machine. The outcome - another transduction - is a thing of subtle, contemporary beauty.

Weave Waves by Scanner and Ismini Samanidou

The exhibition's subtitle is 'exploring sound through forms', so head along and have look (it's in Southampton until 8th March 2014), and why not explore movement, light, magnetism and anything else as forms as well - transduce!

All my ink is not science

A few months ago when I started this blog, I posted about some of the ink drawings I'd been working on, all clearly sci-fi inspired. Since then things have moved on - I've sold a number of them as prints (they are all numbered and signed in limited editions of 25, and you can get them here), am working on an exhibition next year (fingers crossed) and have a selection of prints for sale in places such as the Art House (AKA my second home). I've also been exploring some other influences, for example with my ink drawing entitled 'Matador'.

'Matador' A4 ink on paper.

This is a little sparser in the level of detail than many of my drawings but I was interested in capturing the movement and the merging of man and bull - not glorifying bull-fighting (which is a cruel and repellent activity), but the idea of contesting reason and passion as seen in some of the Cubist works of Picasso and the Surrealist painter Oscar Dominguez. It may be a mere scribble in comparison with those that inspired me, but I'm happy with the outcome and it sparked some interesting online chat - so, from my point of view, a win - I hope you like it too.