Dulwich Artist's Open House 2013

I'll be taking part in the Dulwich Festival Artist's Open House this year.  Our home will be open to the public on Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th May 2013 from 11am - 6pm.

I will be showing recent drawings and prints with a group of artists from the Royal College of Art and Central St Martins, including Emma Corrall, Sian Gledhill, Stephanie Land, Molly Rooke and Jessica Wallis.

More than 200 Artists will be showing work in houses and galleries in the area.  For full details of the programme and the locations open to the public please see:

http://www.dulwichfestival.co.uk/content/artists-open-house-3

Here's some of the work I will be showing (and selling):

Large Untitled Line Drawings, 2012-13
ink on paper
75 x 55 cm

Small Untitled drawings, 2013
white ink, charcoal and gouache on brown paper
18cm x 12cm

Space to Perform, 2012
Screenprint on paper
Edition of 20
59cm x 42cm

Utopian Structure III
Etching with gouache on paper
30cm x 44cm

RCA Interim Show

The Interim show is at the end of the first year of the MA to show work-in-progress.  It was held in the new RCA Dyson building in Battersea, London from 25th April - 3rd May 2012.

Proscriptions
Digital prints and carbon on tracing paper
10 x A4
Installation view

Each peice in the series is printed on multiple layers of differing thickness of tracing papers so that images combine and elements are hidden.  Themes of unfamiliar bodily structures, hidden forms within forms, fragility as well as the surreal and absurd, are explored using images originating from eighteenth century illustrations of coral.  Coral is an organism with a long history of contention about whether it was an animal, plant or stone, as as such is a structure that represents being between states.  This is juxtaposed with typewritten text on carbon paper of instructions to pregnant women of what to avoid to reduce the damaging affect of the female imagination, which if not kept under control could result in monstrous births: 

1. strong longing for something in particular, in which desire the mother is either gratified, or disappointed.  2. A sudden surprise. 3. The sight and abhorrence of an ugly and frightful object. 4.  The pleasure of looking on, and contemplating, even for a long time, a picture or whatsoever is delightful to the fancy.  5.  Fear and consternation, and great apprehension of dangers.  6.  And lastly an excess of anger, or grief, or of joy.

Recent drawings

Repetition

These are part of a series of repetitive line drawings that I have been working on for about a year.  They explore what is hidden or exposed through the repetition of the simple act of drawing a line.  The unreliability of the body in the context of the formal and conceptual is important to me in these works.

Drawings in Ink on Paper

Cafe Gallery, 9-11th April 2012

This is the work that I showed at the Cafe Gallery as part of the first year RCA Printmakers group show 'I took the Lift to the Sixth Floor'.

Papier-Mache and paint

It explores ideas of repetition, the viral, unpredictable growth, bodily structures and uncertain boundaries.

RCA Secret 2011

My first show at the RCA is the RCA Secret 2011 show currently now exhibiting in Kensington.

Alumni, current students and well known artists have all submitted postcards which are for sale at £45 each to raise money for fine art students ... the secret is that you don't know whose work you've bought until after it's yours. I have 3 postcards in the exhibition.

Nice to be in a show with Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor, John Baldessari, Grayson Perry and Yoko Ono, Olafur Elliasson and Yinka Shonibare...

The show runs until Friday 25th and then the sale is on Saturday 26th November 2011.

Click on the link above for more details and to browse the works.

Work, 2010

Work, 2010
Jess Blandford (2010)
Mixed Media
Series of 8 framed prints/paintings, each 32.5cm x 42.5cm.




Installed at 'Q-Art Presents II (work in progress)'.
A group show at APT Gallery, Deptford
18-28 November 2010.


This is a series of prints from advertisements for office furniture from 1960s interior magazines that I have been collecting. On top of the prints I have made drawings of the screwed up remnants of failed work, and applied abstract paint marks. The work is then contained within white frames.

The series seeks to explore the notion of productive work.

In the context of the magazine ads which feature peculiarly empty, pre-digital office spaces and texts that promise idealistic notions of success, efficiency and progress, the work seeks to question whether our digital age is really any more productive than the past, how we define useful or meaningful labour, what the role of the physical now plays in the idea of "an honest day's work", and how one might judge the value of the artist's intervention.

Underlying the work is a set of questions about failure, disappointment and wasted time, set against ideas of success, growth and productivity - nostalgic notions that seem to be increasingly dominant in these times of regressive economic policies.