Tom Burtonwood

Translations from tom burtonwood on Vimeo.

Final version. Titled “Translations.” Come to Three Walls on Friday Feb 26th, doors at 6pm to see it in person.

Permutations 1.0 (second draft)

Wow. this took forever to get in a complete form, scanned in and sequenced. somewhere along the road i lost frames 52 – 55 prior to scanning them in. i’m sure they are around here somewhere but the fact they haven;’t surfaced in day to day activity suggests they may be gone…

eventually i’ll add some noise to this and sign off on it once and for all. i’m pretty happy with this but it’s more important to me as a stepping stone, a marker leading to other cooler, more exciting and mind bending ideas.

inverting of ground came from seeing Alexander Stewart’s recent animations of a similar geometric / isometric direction.

Post it Note sketch, 2000

Posting has been slow of late as i prepare for the start of the school semester, i’m teaching courses at SAIC and UIC in the fall and with the new term only days away at UIC i’m putting the finishing touches to the syllabus and what not. It’s great to be teaching again, i’m looking forward to meeting my students and immersing myself in academic life. I’m hoping to take some classes myself either in Motion Graphics or Maya both of which would be a big help to the studio effort. Holly is also about to start school at SAIC for her MFA in sculpture so we’re about to become a very academic household again.

Post It Notes, 2000

In a search for the sewing machine Holly dug out some sketchbooks from a “hidden” closet last night, and found some real treasures. I’ll be trying to get back in the daily posting groove and share these with everyone. Looking at this current post and the last one i;m struck as usual by the similarities and connections between the work i was making in the period of 1995 – 1997 and 2000 – 2001. The synchronicity of seeing all this work, from Loughborough, Carbondale and now Chicago together for the first time combined with my “new” studio practice is very exciting and I hope that i can get some of these “unfinished ideas” out in the real world soon. As you can see from the drawings these images mostly revolve around the idea of unfolding sculpture, of an installation that is either MANPORT (man portable) or VEH PORT MOD (vehicle portable modules) …. At the time i was making this work, i was back in the UK i think for the summer before my final year in C’dale. Regular air travel meant that i had to carry whatever i took back and forth across the Atlantic. After transporting an aluminum relief across the water in the summer 0f 1999 i realized that i should quit making art out of solid metals like aluminum or iron and focus instead on more MAN PORT objects / items. This idea for making in a general sense has held true for me throughout my practice, working with Holly or by myself. Apart from a brief stint between 2004 – 2005 (ish) i’ve never owned a car or other form of motorized transport and frankly do not plan to. Holly and I factor our living plans around public transport. When we do a big install we rent a cargo van or similar. And so it goes for my art practice, these sketches illustrate ideas for either unfolding installations that expand from a compact module to fill an exhibition hall, to paraphrase Marshall Mcluhan, “the medium is the message”…. the work is about networks, structures—- and it speaks this with form — it is what it is — OR the sketches illustrate pieces that are still modular, but are wheeled and can be moved from place to place and exhibited not necessarily in an exhibition hall but rather taken out into the public sphere.

Post It Notes

Studio wise i’ve been building and calibrating a camera stand to record all the frames of the Permutations animation i drew while in France this summer. It’s taken a lot of effort and fine tuning, and in the long run maybe it would have been quicker just to scan these images in at a low ppi… but i have another experiment / idea to follow up on now…. which if it’s half way interesting will post asap….

Anyhow plenty good material here to work from…. ok now i’m off downstairs to draw.

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. !!!

This sequence is missing a section from the end, where the cube will re-form from a spinning plane– will post this l8tr

Permutations I, time line, sketchbook page. June 2009

Working on a new project, Permutations, an animated sequence showing several variations on a unfolding cube. Sketchbook page sequence below shows a range of possible final unfolded outcomes, currently i’m working on the “master” drawings for the first full sequence. hope to have these complete by middle of week in draft format. really excited about this direction, eventually the final animation will have an audio component too.

Sketchbook sequence. June 2009

Animation sequence below shows first 7 or 8 frames from the upcoming Permutations piece….. can’t wait to get all this done and start playing with these “Containers” and adding some content!

Permutations, opening sequence, June 2009