Tom Burtonwood

Isometric Interior, pastel on paper, 2009

Permutation, pastel on paper, 2009

First drawing in new series of work (95% finished).

Permutations (unfolding pyramid), pen and colored pencil on overlay paper, 2001

This is a pseudo-isometric drawing from 2001 showing a pyramid form emerging from a cube. this piece went on to be developed as a 2 foot square sculpture in card board that has been lost . I plan to remake the sculpture asap. It was a complicated piece with a lot of math to get the angles right but i loved it because of how something so complex could “transform” into a simple cube. each section unfolded to reveal the pyramid. for me i was interested in the idea the that something could unravel infinitely to base materials and still reassemble itself to an original memory driven form.

this piece was drawn on “disney” overlay paper purchased at MGM studios back in the late 80′s. you can see the cut outs at the bottom of the page to attach to a light table. there is also a little disney icon that unfortunately did not fit on the scanner bed, i will photos separately.

p.s. posting has been light of late. first we were on vacation, then we had to get caught up post vacation. now i realize that getting caught up is perhaps a misnomer but i do need to get back on the wagon as there’s a lot more stuff to upload. part of the problem is that i’ve started “making” things again, as the animations that have gone up attest to, but they are but one facet of a four ring circus, i’m also working on drawing again, which really is a first for me in the last decade, and i’m working on some new wooden constructions. the fourth ring is WHAT IT IS, our project space, we have an opening next week featuring Andrew Rigsby’s video work so there’s that all to do too!!!

but i’m also concerned about both the look / feel of the site which i need ot stamp with my creative persepctive and the organization of the site and this archive which is admittedly a little scatter shot a little to random but i’m stil lnot really clear if i want to post thing chronologially as that’s too mcuh of a calendar, so i need ot come up with a way of slotting the disparate posts into sections that work. !!!

Anglesey, 1995

Despite trying to post in sequence and show development of the print making work from my 2nd year at loughborough, i find myself at a bit of a loss in terms of documentation and therefore i need to digging deeper into portfolios and perhaps even shoot some new photos of old work.

In the meantime this is a photo taken on the bleak northern coast of Anglesey. I think it was my third time to Anglesey, having been there twice while at Shelly High School. LCAD took 40 or so brave souls up there for a week of drawing from the landscape and literally being blown off the cliff faces. i think it was meant to be a sculpture trip, Paul Gent and i tagged along for the ride with a few other painters. i forget exactly when we were there but i know it was fairly nice that week in L’boro and suitably shitty on Anglesey. It’s a barren, windswept place, that the RAF seems to like using for low level practice flights. I always enjoyed trips the island and we had a whale of a time up there making drawings, hiking to kwik save for cheap wine and other such hijinks.

Untitled (bridge to nowhere), pen on paper, 1996

This drawing taken from my sketchbook was the 2nd of a series of drawings, prints, paintings and eventually sculpture (installations) that i produced in my second semester of my second year at loughborough. for me this work has always been pivotal in my development as an artist. by the end of semester 1 of the 2nd year i think it’s fair to say i was flailing around. working from the landscape just wasn’t working out and i really really didn’t know what i was doing. the “skills” i was looking for weren’t really being taught and it was pretty much left up to you to figure out what it was you wanted to make and why. like i said i was pretty lost and losing my way with each turn.

at some point i made a sketch / lino cut of a bridge that led nowhere sitting atop a bunch of semi detached houses. at the time i think it was more about my personal sense of being confused but rightaway it became a great metaphor for a critique of culture / society / politics etc but done in a non-didactic, not preachy, ambiguous way.

Untitled (bridge to nowhere) detail, pen on paper, 1996

to my mind it goes something like this, the bridge represents a structure (or system) with a purpose. a bridge can cross a chasm, ford a river, link two sides, cultures etc. but a bridge and other structures like it require foundations, supports etc. the houses on the other represent people. so the bridge without foundations is held up by the people, and as such it’s as much a burden on them as it is a force for change or progress. and so i started making many images based on these ideas of structures and bridges and the like that serve a progressive agenda but can be used equally as oppressive mechanisms. like all good art students i was pretty sure i knew what was best for society in general and so to be fair these works were intended as a critique of the “normal” folk working their days jobs yadda yadda. at least to begin with anyway. so that the job is this oppresive activity that keeps us in our place and the bridge is this unattainable goal to strive for. but it turns out it goes to nowhere. pretty standard pseudo marxist student thinking. but at the time it was good for me to have a subject to work with and something i felt strongly aobut in the work once more.

Rendell St., Loughborough, Leicestershire.

This is the house is shared with Andy and Rob at the time. I think living down by the canal and near to the railway had a big influence on this “bridge” work. I was also reading Iain Banks stuff at the time, which is very dark and also quite critical of society, particularly his novel “The Bridge” where a car crash victim trapped in a coma imagines this whole city located on a bridge, the novel describes his struggles with trying to overcome the dream and return to reality. (clearly i borrowed a few ideas from Banks on this series.) I think later i was reading William Gibson who also used the bridge metahpor for 2 of his novels taking the Golden Gate bridge in SF as a post apocalyptic community. Anyhow Loughborough was always kind of post apocalyptic so it kinda fitted later on. Also around that time i went to Bangor in Wales and was impressed with the bridges out there.

After a while the bridge work became less and less about the critique element and more about making constructions and making formalist aesthetic decisions, which in turn led to the Studio Installation i posted here: http://tomburtonwood.com/2009/studio-installation-circa-1996/ this installation was my attempt to “get inside” the structures and create the all encompassing art experience, influenced fairly heavily by Arakawa and Madeline Gins and their concept of Reversible Destiny http://reversibledestiny.org/home.php….. anyhow so everything pretty much came full circle the bridge to nowhere became this literal bridge to new expression for me and opened my practice up to many new ways of thinking and working. sure enough i still lost the plot from time to time and have veered in many new directions since but these simple drawings were enough to devise a new trajectory for my practice which until then had been me working from life, drawing and trying to paint with little success and not really getting it!

the funny thing as i go thru all this old work and try to place it into context with each other and the new stuff is realizing the threads going thru all of it. systems, structures, representations of these things but also practical deployable infrastructure, ying and yang of adminstration, form and function.