Tom Burtonwood

Recently it’s all infrastructure all the time. Working on getting studio spaces set up and ducks in a row. Not so much time for actual art making However i thought i’d share two images, that have for different reasons had a big impact on my practice. The first image, above, is a club flyer from the late mid 90′s probably 95 or thereabouts for a collective called Desert Storm. I went to a few of their nights in Nottingham at that time. I loved what they were doing politically as well as musically. In 1996 Desert Storm took their sound system on the road to war torn Sarajevo.

The Desert Storm flyer shows a turn table sporting a “Nort” insignia from the 2000AD story Rogue Trooper. Again this comic was a big influence i’m not sure how or if it gets expressed thru the work so much… but in terms of downtime i’ve spent a lot of it reading Rogue Trooper and of late tracking down collected trades at Wizard World and such….

Despite the “Southers” being portrayed as the “good” guys in Rogue Trooper i love that DS took the “Nort” logo…… as a Northern Englishman i could never quite relate to the idea of cheering the “Southers” on…. ok back to my infrastructure play.

…work in progress, 2001 (installation with David Lohman and David Constable / with Jason Pritchett on the audio component… link>  Institutional Critique )

This photograph documents that chaos created when 3 artists collaborate on a site specific installation deep within the “corridors of power.” Revisiting the scene of a prior installation Burtonwood and Lohman brought Constable along to wreak sonic havoc once more on the Allyn Building admin corridor SIUC school of art. in this outing the contents of the still life closet was emptied out into the hall way and a tannoy installed with a looping glitchy gnarly sequence of sounds pounding out.