Adventures in Copper - Summer 2023

Over the Summer of 2023 I worked on a series of large format copper original works which was a fairly ambitious undertaking as I had never done it before. I had decided in the Spring to take a stand at the London Design Fair as an exercise in 'getting it out there’ and during July, August and early September I worked hard on these.

The project started with some large pieces of copper plate that I acquired. It was filthy dirty, patinated and covered in glue - so that meant having to clean it off first.

Light Lines Series

Deciding what to do with the copper to present a collection I decided to narrow my focus to the Lines of Light mentioned in the previous post and to restrict the language to equally sized hexagons with different line weights. This gave me the limitation to work more geometrically (maths is not my strong point however) and to keep the focus on the composition and etching.

Within the etched lines are photographic textures of old walls, scratched metal and other abstract textures. These are then exposed on to the copper using a photo sensitive emulsion applied to the metal and the textures printed on to acetates and then the two placed together in an exposure unit. Colin at Artichoke print helped me manage the project as these plates were huge.

The results are varied. I’m generally happy with them but the process taught me a lot and I do plan on going back to these and adapting them slightly. So it’s still a work in progress !

Take a look below at some of the images from the process.

After exposure to light and ready to etch

Etching…..

Kind of wish I left it like this….

applying heat with blow torches

At the London Design Fair, September 2023

Collaging with Light

The journey I’ve been on this year with light and colour intensified when my Mum died suddenly in February. On the day that she died I drove back in the most incredible late winter sunset, raking intense light over the Suffolk countryside and the trees, hedges and lampposts were all bright orange to me. It was intense in many senses of the word and a visual experience engraved in my memory. In the weeks after she left I began to see ‘lines of light’ wherever I went. This was mainly due to the low light of February and then into early Spring, but streaks of light would appear on the side of buildings, on floors, walls - pretty much everywhere and most specifically it would often be orange, that same orange I saw on that long, long drive home. This appearance of light became a source of comfort to me and added to my fascination of the effect of light and colour on our psyche. A few weeks after her death I began experimenting with light and colour bouncing off copper and I had the idea to start ‘collaging with light’.

I realised that day when I was playing with sunlight coming in to the studio and holding up coloured pieces of glass and mirrors that the shapes I often see out in the world were replicating themselves on to the painted and burnished copper, creating the most magical colours which would pretty much be impossible to produce using paint. It set the course for a line of enquiry which is only just beginning to develop now - but the ‘Lines of Light’ continued as a subject in to the works I developed on copper for the London Design Festival…. more in the next post coming soon.

London Design Festival 2023

Coming up next month will be the London Design Fair where I will be showing a new collection of original works on copper. These are still in production and no images exist yet of these difficult beauties - although I am documenting the process over on instagram.

Find me on Stand IB31 in the main hall of the Truman Brewery. This is a mainly trade only event but public do have access and is part of the London Design Festival.

For further information please get in touch - or visit the show page here

Robyn Denny Show

I wrote this post during lockdown but didn’t post it at the time…. but in the wider context of my work it feels relevant to place it here as Robyn Denny was the catalyst for returning to my art practice after shying away from it for 20 years. A journey that I began during that weird time and now after 3 years I’m producing and creating and going a bit wild! I thank Robyn Denny for getting me started, but there are definitely some significant other artists who I will write about here from time to time.

March 2021
Like most people in the world at the moment, I am craving the outside world and most specifically going to exhibitions and drinking in the works of artists past and present. To me, there is nothing quite the same as being in front of a piece of work and feeling it.

My obsession and love of abstraction led me to the door of the Bernard Jacobson gallery in October 2019 to view the work of painter Robyn Denny. It was a chance encounter walking past the gallery on my way to the RA and so his work was fresh to me. The gallery space is remarkable - a converted car park that’s now a huge salon underground and with a smaller viewing area in the reception.

Converted Car Park : The Bernard Jacobsen Gallery

Halfway around the exhibition I was starting to float - like the feeling of having met a new love. Although these works on paper were fairly small in comparison to his other large scale huge works, I wanted to just climb in to the paintings and bathe in them. One of the slight let downs of the exhibition was that the frames were glazed with reflective glass - but as I am reflected in the photos I also feel a part of them. It was one of the best afternoons and still feel the buzz from it nearly 18 months later. That’s what I’m talking about - the real feeling you get from seeing Art - rather than something that you may save to your pinterest and move on to the next thing.

I found this quote in a book my husband subsequently bought for me about Denny which resonates for me in terms of how I’m approaching my own practice and thoughts on the matter….

“Colour then becomes a vehicle for recording, not abstract ideas (it is too sensual and, as Baudelaire said of it, too visible for that), but sensations and experiences which have no other material counterpart. It becomes a way of touching the intangible or seeing the invisible, and if such phraseology smacks of the metaphysical that ultimately is what it has got to do: art that does less, doesn’t do enough’….A painting by Denny firmly but subtly refuses that surrender of self. It is capable of evoking mystery but anchors it in an image that appeals to the ordering intellect and is brought within reach of our own physical scale. Lucid, unemphatic, symmetrical, it is about preserving a certain necessary balance within us between the claims of the knowable and the unknown. ”

— David Thompson, Penguin New Art 3, 1971

My absolute favourite

Denny was a gesturalist, but he was quite clear that abstract painting was not about paint in the abstract: it was about meaning expressed in abstract imagery.

I will write more about Robyn Denny in due course as he’s been a massive influence on me. Other artists I will be writing about are Barbara Kasten, Sandra Blow and Barbara Hepworth - not because they’re women artists but because they are very inspiring to me.