Group Exhibition at AVA Gallery with students on the Professional Doctorate  Fine Art programme.  Feb 2010

Sculptural work exhibited at the Old Woolworths building in Leytonstone as part of the Leytonstone Arts Trail.   June 2009 .

Recent sculptural work at the Professional Doctorate and PhD Showcase at the AVA gallery, UEL, Docklands Campus  June 2009

Print and book works also on display

There are fourteen artists in this exhibition whose work ranges from drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, digital print to installation. They represent a diverse cultural mix reflecting the international community that makes up UEL.

The show highlights a wealth of cultural and international perspectives, a well-travelled maturity and a broad range of considered and reflective working methodologies.  The artists are:

Gisel Azevedo, Martin Barrett, Matthew Chambers, Anna Daniels, Grenville Davey, Garry Doherty, Paul Manners,

Kon Markogiannis, Peter Nevin, Patrick Oronsaye, Vassilis Pafilis, Hedley Roberts, Hideyuki Sawayanagi,Timothy Weston

The title for the exhibition is taken from Richard Sennett’s recently published book “The Craftsman”. In it he reflects on the current cultural agenda driven by business interests that want a flexible workforce, with transferable, yet shallow craft skills, a society where the competitive market and financial efficiency has driven out the human need to do a job well, a position that presupposes that motivation is based purely on money. In challenging this, Sennett makes the point that everyone can become expert and this is not a case of being gifted or even a genius, but a product of practice, trial and error and the combination of hand, head and eye. The common thread is a commitment or need to practice, a need that overrides immediate financial rewards in favour of ‘getting it right’. For the artists in this exhibition this is the overriding priority. Art is a vocation, a process rather than a product, and often a way of saying something that cannot be expressed adequately in words.

The UEL Professional Doctorate attracts a variety of artists. About a third of the current body of Professional Doctorate students are academics seeking to to strike a positive balance between their commitment to education and their desire for creative autonomy through this qualification. The majority of the remainder are artists with a substantial professional history behind them for whom the course offers both professional enhancement and the opportunity to work in an academic setting. And the last few are MA students for whom this is step on the road to becoming practicing artists. What they have in common is the their willingness to put themselves and their ideas and beliefs about their practice under intense critical scrutiny, and attempt to ground their work and methodologies squarely on well thought-out premises. The result is not a UEL house-style, but rather a number of artists who are strong in their individual practices. Perhaps this culture of doing things well and knowing what you are doing is one way on which the paradigm criticised by Sennett can start to be displaced.

Six digital prints  exhibited in the AVA Gallery, School of Architecture and The Visual Arts, Docklands Campus, University of East London in May 2008.  This group exhibition highlighted how different artists use drawing in the various stages of their creative practice . 

The images I exhibited are part of an ongoing series of digital prints that I have been working on over several years.  They are each about 30 cm square and are developments of a larger group of line drawings that I have scanned into the computer and redrawn and painted using digital imaging software. 

Group Show 2005

Architecture and The Visual Arts Gallery, Docklands Campus, University of East London. I had work included in an exhibition of on-going and experimental work made by the staff in the Digital Arts and Visual Communication Subject Area. The work that I showed was three dimensional in form and was a development from an earlier body of drawings that explored the paradoxes of perspective. These wall mounted constructions developed this interest into three dimensions.

Not strictly an exhibition but an interesting on-line collaborative drawing experiment using the MARCEL network. MARCEL is a high bandwidth internet connection that links a substantial (and growing) group of Art, Design and Media institutions around the globe. The event was very speculative and included members of staff and students on a variety of programmes within the Digital Arts and Visual Communications field.

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Exhibition of large scale drawings worked directly onto the wall of the recently opened AVA (Architecture and The Visual Arts) Gallery on the Docklands Campus at the University of East London. I enlisted the help of two willing student collaborators who helped me draw up the images from an overhead projector. I was able to use the corner of the gallery to create an illusionistic space that defied the logic of the space in some ways.