Shaped or Object Narrative is a term I use that has developed from an approach and concurrent processes of drawing, recording, and responding developed in the sketchbook over some years.
There have been four main series of shaped narratives developed over the last four years – Blue and White Shaped Narratives, Coloured Shaped Narratives, Three-Legged Narratives and Small Object Narratives. The works explore and integrate notions around the sense of shapes within shapes, objects within objects and the relationships and hierarchies between the constituent parts.
Bond and Coyne – Staff development Drawing workshop – Delivered by Gary CloughBond and Coyne – Staff development Drawing workshop – Delivered by Gary Clough
It was a great pleasure to be invited to visit the Bond and Coyne studios in South London in November to a lead a drawing workshop. Bond and Coyne led a visibility campaign and film for the RCA’s Graduate Diploma in Art and Design programme, and the workshop was a direct result of this relationship. It was a great opportunity to expand and investigate further approaches to the teaching and the language of drawing working with art and design professionals in a staff development context.
I was recently invited by Emre Altindağ, PhD researcher and editor for an interview in the first edition of Memory and Light and to be the keynote speaker at the accompanying conference in August 2021. Memory and Light is an international artist-led collective and new publication for illustrators, graphic novelists, and storytellers. I discussed with Emre the role of narrative and storytelling as a key tool in my approach to sketchbooks and my practice. Article pdf here.
I am pleased to be part of the exhibition I Didn’t Lick It, a group exhibition of over 350 artists who have collaborated using mail art with the Bruton Correspondence School over the last twelve months.
The Bruton Correspondence School is a (slow) mail art exchange project established by Chris Roberts and Rebecca McClelland, partly in response to the impact of the worldwide lockdown and their attempt to connect with a broader audience on the most basic and meditative level.
The collection showcases the innate ability of collage to construct a fresh and new visual exchange beyond the two-dimensional into the structural world and craft of visual making. While experimental, each collage is also didactic, layered with hidden messages, reoccurring motifs and shared concerns that speak as an abstract indicator of the surreal times we live in.
This was an excellent opportunity to broaden my own current research and investigations into the collaborative possibilities of drawing and image-making through a shared response to secondary materials and correspondence and annotation. Participating in the project was also a chance to indulge my recent obsession with moiré patterns printed inside envelopes.
The Brooklyn Art Library is home to the world’s largest collection of artists sketchbooks. I completed one of the project sketchbooks earlier this year and have just sent it off to join the archive of over 30,000. It was a project I’d followed over the years and I am pleased to have now added my own sketchbook contribution.
I am very excited to have been invited to exhibit my work at Painters + Collection 2021, at Nakata Museum, Japan. 21 artists from Japan, Korea, Mexico and the UK are showing work alongside the museum’s collection of 19th and 20th-century paintings, curated by Yuko Kunichika.
Rather like the singular activity of drawing in sketchbooks, cross-stitch as activity and pastime has made even more sense during lockdown. The last few months have allowed me to review the Sampler series – a body of stitched works using variegated threads, initially shown in 2018. Lockdown has enabled me the opportunity to experiment with different colour palettes and investigate the potential for further work using cross-stitch and space-dyed thread as a tool for translating ideas around memory and and recoding.
Sketchbooks are an intrinsic and integral part of my practice, a place where I collate, record and synthesize viewed and remembered experiences.
I am currently obsessed with comic book like hieroglyphs, in search of or potentially reliant on a visual equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, combining the recognized, the invented and the possible. These draw from a range of real and imagined destinations and cultural references, many from regular visits to China.
New work in progress, drawings and prints developed from recent journeys in China.
As part of the South East Open Studios over two weekends 15-18 and 22-25 June, I will be showing alongside Heather Haythornthwaite and Sarah King at the Hazelnut Press.
Gary Clough – Artist and International Education practitioner 