Sketchbook to America

I’ve finally finished my sketch book for the Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project - and this morning I posted it off to the Brooklyn Art Library, where it will join all other sketchbooks ready for the nine state tour. All the books submitted in time will do a tour of galleries and museums in Brooklyn, Austin, San Francisco, Portland, Atlanta and Chicago - where the public will be able to book them out like regular library books.

Here are a few drawings from the one that I have just sent off. If you would like to see the entire sketchbook I will shortly be posting all of the drawings (all 40 pages) on my other blog - Oodles of Doodles. I’ll aim for one post a day but we’ll see how it goes.

This drawing takes its inspiration from my sculpture, The City.

As you can see - I have a bit of a thing for boxes on wheels...

...and for things bursting or pouring out of boxes.

So far six states, have signed up to play host to the show but it is likely that more states will take part before the exhibition starts in March 2011. After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be bar-coded and available for the public to view. All participating artists on the tour have a webpage in which to show off their work – and here’s mine.

Orifice Boxes - New Work

I’ve just started working on a new series of sculptures that I’m hoping will be ready in time for a group show that I and fellow RBS sculptor, Alice Cunningham, are looking to organise later this year in Shoreditch, London. The exhibition is to be an all sculpture event; however, I think it might be nice to have some examples of working drawings on display too. Although it’s early days yet and we haven’t decided on how many artists to include in the show, I have already invited a very talented artist, Gary Martin, who has accepted.
Anyway - back to my new series of sculptures. Basically, I was itching to make something so I started trawling through my pile of old sketchbooks looking for any unrealised projects that I could bring to life, when I came across the above sketch. It is a drawing that I made a few years ago that was inspired by my earlier wall-mounted Orifice sculpture but which was describing an idea for a box sculpture on wheels (no surprise there then). The initial idea was for the box to be cobbled together from a mixture of different bits of wood and odds and ends in a Frankenstein’s monster kinda way. From the photos above, you can see the early stages of the new piece (from the orifice carved from a block of wood, to the completed front panel). As is often the case, it was the production of the work that triggered ideas for spin-off pieces or pieces that would work as a series. In this family group each of the sculptures, while being of varying sizes and dimensions, will have a carved orifice or portal and have something at its centre. This first one is to have a nail-encrusted inner box, not too dissimilar to my previous piece, Nail Box.