Venice! I am taking part in @Proseed_Collective_Venice24 – a collaboration brought together by Carlisle-based artist, Daniel Ibbotson. We will be exhibiting at Palazzo Bembo, Venice, under the auspices of the ECC (European Cultural Centre), 20 April – 24 November.
Palazzo Bembo, Venice
Huge thanks to Daniel for including me along with 40+ other artists from Cumbria and elsewhere in the UK.
Edinburgh In addition to the Venice adventure, there will be an exhibition featuring some of the same group of artists at 24 Art Gallery, Leith, Edinburgh, 1–14 June.
Kendal I will have a solo exhibition at the People’s Gallery, Kendal Museum, including drawings, prints and paintings. Opens 15 August. Preview night 16 August. Exhibition continues until 21 September, opening days are Thursday to Saturday.
Letterpress
I had my first attempt at letterpress printing on an Adana Press at Linden Print Studio:
It was a very enjoyable and educational day. Many thanks to Vega! The results will be on show at Kendal in August/September – see above.
When you acquire a small printing press, and have an exhibition scheduled for 2024, the natural result is some printmaking – here’s what I’ve been up to lately:
Lately, if I wake in the night, I’ve been hearing the lonely call of an owl – ‘too-woo’ with no ‘too-wit’ Like the hollow ‘tock’ of a long-case clock … erratic, winding down … Like a mournful, meandering metronome Like the silvery beam of a lighthouse, slow and smooth, sweeping across a sea of darkness reaching out into an emptiness summoning, not warning
News release: Caldew Press in Carlisle recently published my essay on art and environmental crisis, among other things, under the title ‘Living is easy with eyes closed’ – copies are available directly from me for £6.50 or from the publisher. If you are interested in buying a copy, please let me know by commenting below or via my contact page). And if you have already read it, thank you! Your responses are very welcome.
Please read this article, and consider your choices. Instead of staying away from COP27 to focus on ‘domestic’ problems, you could take advantage of your current position to act on climate change, which is also domestic because it is planetary! Nowhere is exempt from the effects of climate change. Remember COVID? You took unprecedented steps then, supporting the furlough scheme. But the climate crisis is an even bigger threat than COVID. Now is the time for addressing it as an existential threat – stop throwing money at fossil fuels and start throwing it at renewables, insulating every home in the UK, training people to do that work, enabling people to get out of cars and onto public transport (which means improving public transport), restoring the ecosystem, greening the cities… You want growth? These are the things that need to grow, not the economic shibboleth of GDP.
You can go down in history as a leader who helped to turn the tide, or go down with history as it sails over the cliff of environmental collapse.
Imagination = the capacity to conceive of that which is not actual/actually present to us
To see how things might become different from what has seemed permanent, for good or ill.
Without imagination it is impossible to take seriously the prospect of climate collapse until it happens, or to conceive of the social and other changes that it might bring or that might prevent the worst possible outcome.
Without imagination it is impossible to empathise with others whose lives and circumstances do not resemble our own.
Without imagination it is impossible to think outside our presuppositions, to question our own certainties.
Imagination which can reach beyond the mundane actual connects us to philosophy, art, humanity, mind, to the future and the past.
(Cf. Yuval Noah Harari TED talk on human domination being based on ability to coordinate action in very large numbers flexibly, and the role of fictions like money, nations etc. in this coordination.)
Here’s an irrelevant image, unless you can imagine a connection:
ideas melt like snow 