Project News: Slice

TBC Artists' Collective researching the Slice project.

Today TBC artists Beverley Bennett, Charley Peters, Laura Davidson and Paul Mendez were in east London undertaking research for their international art commission Slice. The group are working towards a body of new work of performative collaborative drawings based in architectural spaces within a mile-long section of London between Liverpool Street Station and Whitechapel Station. The work will be completed by the summer and exhibited in London and Lahore in Autumn 2011.

Work In Progress: Charley Peters

Charley Peters, CMYK Sketch (2011)
Acrylic on Paper

Above is one of a number of sketches by TBC artist Charley Peters for a series of new paintings using a CMYK palette. The sketches develop Peters' Ben-Day dot and pixel works started in 2010, where hand-rendered marks are evocative of mechanical printing or digitised image processes.

More news from Charley Peters: www.charleypetersprojects.com

Walk On By

A TBC banner stands proudly before the caryatids of The Parish of St. Pancras

A year in planning and it was over a week of chills, breakdowns, walk-outs and artists' talks.

Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing, the Collective's first show, was an exploration of contemporary drawing practice and the presence of drawing within different art forms, from video to embroidery to sculpture. Its venue was The Crypt, a cold, damp, earthy space that wouldn't at first - or indeed upon reflection - seem to lend itself to the displaying of works on paper, which made up the bulk of the show. Indeed, after only five days in the space, some of the artists involved observed slight decay in the pristine quality of their works, all of which were framed.

This was the only negative; the show was well received; it was generally accepted that TBC Artists' Collective had indeed subjected contemporary drawing practice to a rigorous interrogation, and  comments from the public largely expressed pleasure at the standard of work on show. My personal experience, however, was mixed.


For the rest of of this article, visit The Stillborn Jeune Homme.

Work in Progress: Charley Peters

Compositional sketch for Xerox Drawing series, cut tracing paper and light.

For more current work from TBC artist Charley Peters, check out her blog, Carbon Particles: charleypeters.blogspot.com

Work in Progress: Paul Mendez

The presence of drawing in Mendez’ work centres around, firstly, the opportunistic entrapment of floating words and phrases onto paper, that exist individually as statements or coagulate to form prose, and secondly, the exploration of thoughts and ideas that may be expressed in a manner liminal to both words and images. In the former, Mendez’ biographical writings form the basis of a ‘word bin’ from which various phrases and scenes are extracted and spliced together, adapting William Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ technique, and in the latter, statements are reduced to lines on a grid, that question how beauty translates across art forms.

Delineation Installation Preparation: Charley Peters

Above: Artist's impression of the installation of Viral II in the Crypt Gallery, London.

TBC artist Charley Peters will be exhibiting two works from her new Viral series of drawings at Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing in October 2010. In addition to Viral, Peters will also show a collection of diagnostic works that explore the role of drawing in her practice in the Drawing Dialogues area on the exhibition. This important part of the Delineation exhibition will interrogate how TBC artists use drawing processes in preparatory, research and collaborative works.

For more information about the Viral series and Peters' current work see: charleypeters.blogspot.com

Work In Progress: Beverley Bennett

 

For more information visit nowthaticanaffordlaughter.blogspot.com

Delineation: Words in Progress

When I was a child I was scared of washing machines. I couldn't walk past one for fear that I would be sucked in by it. My paternal grandmother's house was the worst, because the living room could only be accessed via the small kitchen, in which there was a narrow gap between the dining table and the washing machine. One day, when I was four, I arrived there with my dad, and the washing machine was on spin. I was holding his hand, and as he proceeded through the kitchen, I froze and dug my heels into the floor. He laughed and made fun of me out of embarrassment, and took my hand. I screamed. I would not walk past that washing machine. He picked me up and put me high on his shoulder, and took me through to the living room. I subsequently rationalised the fact that if the washing machine wasn't able to swallow my six-foot-tall father, and I was on his shoulder, then I was safe.


I'm at a time when I'm not able to write much creatively. I don't know why, and I shouldn't just accept it, but even after ten years of experimenting as a self-identified writer, fear of a blank page still seizes me in that same way. I don't know what I am going to say, or how it will come out, if indeed anything will come out at all. The longer I leave it, the more difficult it gets. Starting on a blank page, in the case of writing or drawing, is like facing a black hole, or, for a four-year-old with a spectacular imagination who perhaps hasn't watched enough TV, a banal household appliance. To use an unavoidable chiché (I can't be arsed to try to come up with anything more eloquent), it is a step into the unknown. Only when you pick up the pen, pencil or pastel, or strike the keys on the laptop, will you write or draw.


Sometimes, though, you need a pick-up. Sometimes you need an authority figure to rationalise your delusions and demonstrate that everything will be okay, someone who will click their fingers metaphorically and bring you back to reality. The washing machine is not a black hole that will spin out of control and swallow up the world within its wet cotton folds. The blank page is not going to jump up in your face and suffocate you. 


From an irrational fear, washing machines soon became an obsession. I was the weird six-year old actually sitting on the kitchen floor amongst a five-person family's piles of dirty laundry, watching the drum go round one way a few revolutions and back round the other, sounding like a generator in a sci-fi film, the warm water lapping up against the concave window.  I sat smelling the smells of the kitchen, dominated by the unreachable dirt between the washing machine and the kitchen carcass, and the congealed fat in the fryer. The drum of the washing machine reminded me of my other obsession - cars. I would be pressed up against the rear window, watching faster cars swoosh past my dad's beige Cortina. I loved wet roads, when the cars overtaking us looked particularly dynamic, their wheels gliding through planes of water, spraying it up like a thumb over a hosepipe. Like the drum of a washing machine on spin.

Studio Views: Charley Peters

Excerpt from a short film documenting the production of Viral II, a new piece of work by TBC artist Charley Peters for the collective's forthcoming exhibition Delineation.

More at charleypeters.blogspot.com

Work In Progress: James Jeff Lindley

Below are some images and working drawings:

Currently working on a number of drawings related to the piece "Of Course, originally".

Work in Progress: Charley Peters

Above: Xerox Sketch, 2010

Xerox Sketch is part of a body of a current body of exploratory work by TBC artist Charley Peters, in which a photocopier is used to create mechanical 'drawings'.

For more of Peters' work: charleypeters.blogspot.com

Work in Progress: Beverley Bennett

Current sketchbook work. For more information check out nowthaticanaffordlaughter.blogspot.com

Work in Progress: Laura Davidson

Photo research for work that will be exhibited in Delineation.

More work can viewed on lauraelizabethdavidson.com

In Progress: Elizabeth Oniri

Working toward the Delineation exhibition, Texture and Line

In progress: Charley Peters

Check out works in progress for Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing by TBC member Charley Peters: charleypeters.blogspot.com