Tom Burtonwood

Half way thru uploading some new drawings to flickr produced this last month. I’m really happy with the direction the work is taking. it’s certainly giving me some pause as i circle around almost fifteen years in terms of interest and output, back to the humble cube and all the variants and possibilities it offers. Look out for new installations, animations, sculpture, video and drawings in the months to come.

The focus of these drawings has been two fold (ha! pun). first to make some schematics for custom sections akin to tetris blocks for new sculpture i’m planning, cut first on laser cutter and then assembled spore like in the studio and painted. second to continue to try and solve the problem of making a cube flatten completely to a square a conundrum i;d like to realize in both sculpture and time based medium > which gave rise to a good number of drawings riffing off tetris like patterning and then finally some drawings taking the square as building block rather than the cube per se and of course comnig bakc around to make patterns based on the square too.

stay tuned. all will be revealed!

Sketchbook page, lino cut on photocopy, 1996

Wow. totaly cubist (ha ha ha, pun intended). isometric-ish on the top face of the cube. in one point perspective on the bottom face, 2 spatial realities braque would be proud, and then that’s super imposed on a photocopy of a terraced houses in Leeds from above. it’s basic mistakes like this that make me cringe sometimes and others LOL. i think in this instance a bit of both, as i only just noticed the mistake!

anyhow i digress. this image is a good segue from the “module” bridge drawings, into modular prints. this body of work got me out of the painting dept, and into the printing dept at loughborough. i say got, all i really did was cut some lino and wander into print making to see Gill or Karen and print a bunch of stuff. the faculty in print making were very laid back and very welcoming. i spent a lot of time in there. at first making small lino cuts, one color etc, then working on more complicated 3, 4, 5 color linos. why i never learnt screen printing at that time is just beyond me as it would have been so much easier to do this work and to make awesome work now. but that’s that.

this image marks a departure from the sprawling, octopus like, chaotic morass of structure, girders, supports, buttressing and so forth that characterized the early drawings, and instead takes the form of a simple cross braced building block. in retrospect this shape readily assumes the character of a cage, a cell of some kind. not entirely trapping the detainee perhaps but nonetheless it’s is there visually.

the print making was a natural progression with the work, it meant i could clone / reproduce the modules easily and in diverse fashions. working outside painting dept was awesome and interacting with a whole new bunch of artists was really enriching, and some life long friendships were established. over next few days i’ll hope fully post a few of the notable prints from that period, before we lurch back to the sculptural / installation works that followed.

Studio Installation, mixed media, 1996 / 97

2 images, which i think are photographs of slides projected in the studio. At this time i was doing a lot of studio scale installations, building the total environment pieces, photographing them as slides, and projecting them back onto the installation in question or some other construction in the studio. So the effect was to break up the space several times and fragment it in interesting ways. these two images are i think projected onto a blank wall however. but u get the general idea. sections of the studio were painted deep strong colors and pieces of wood and other material were used to break up and section the space. sort of painting in space, this was for the me the apex of my “structural work” and from this point i veered off into making earth works.with these installations i encouraged the viewer to physically interact with the work, in order to experience the entire room it was necessary to clamber over pallets and other obstacles stacked up in the space. These items were also painted and arranged according to my taste. i think inm the end i got tired of the profound difficulty at knowing what to take from this and how to see it beyond my studio environment. i think in many ways it was more an incubatory for me to find a way of working more so than an end result. that said, this is exactly the type of large scale installation i’d like to find a way to produce. later on in carbondale the unfolding sculptures were an attempt to create an easily deployable module that unfolded could produce a level of spatial fragmentation like these pieces. i think that one recurring theme in all my work, and with holly too, has been portability. from time to time i make works that are patently impossible to move easily and these pieces are the flip side of the drive towards mobility. but i keep coming back to this MANPORT / MANPAD production. …. hmmm. (p.s. sorry about all the dust, i need ot clean the scanner).

Studio Installation, mixed media, 1996 / 97