A Story
Risograph Print on A3 paper
Ive made an edition of 20 of these, available via the link in my bio and there’s also some on the shop at Two Queens x
‘Flowers’ matched pair of riso prints in red and blue
A4 size Nautilus Classic 250gsm paper
Edition of 9, signed and numbered to front
£20 for the pair, link to buy in my bio, or buy in person from the 2Q shop x
Sketchbook drawings from the last 6ish months that I am putting here to inform you that I persist. Mostly this summer I have been painting, but i’m not ready to show you that.
Here’s some 35mm photos I took around the studio at Two Queens @twoqueensleicester earlier this year and just scanned the negatives.
I’m sure you can guess the subtext of me sharing these is the current fundraising work to try to buy the building at 2Q and keep it going, but if you’ve never been there before it might be hard to imagine what kind of place it is or why its special. You might see lots of pictures and videos of a place that is busy and energetic, and it is those things but sometimes its also a quiet and peaceful place.
I don’t do it that often, but I like coming into the studio quite early before anyone else is in, when the angles of the light through the windows and skylights are low and cast good shadows. In the morning it feels somehow like the night has cleansed the space and new things can happen and be made.
That kind of thing is hard to capture, and if 2Q does end up closing its good to have something like these pics that captures this atmosphere.
I hope these images do something to communicate that, and maybe even if you’ve never been here you might have been somewhere similar, and might want this place and others like it to stay open and thriving. If you do the links you need are in 2Q bio. @twoqueensleicester
Thanks Stuart @stuart.hicking for lending me your scanner. Thats another good thing about being part of something like 2Q - lending and borrowing skills and equipment!
#ilfordhp5 #olympusom1
Shadow (person)
Photographic print in frame.
As seen in the recent Two Queens members show, which has now ended, sorry if you missed it.
I made this print in the dark room at the university where I have been doing some hourly paid lecturing over the past 2 years. Part of what I’ve been teaching is photography and video to first year fine art students, which has been a nice excuse to be in the darkroom again and make some work of my own in there to remember how it all happens.
I cast this shadow on the front of Two Queens on a sunny day and really overexposed the film, but managed to rescue a print with 180 seconds under the enlarger (Jim the technician called me Oppenheimer). This is a 10x8” print with a piece of red acetate over the top. I think I wanted to do that because things always feel a bit more magic under the redlight of the darkroom and its a shame when they come out into the real word.
Teaching photography for a bit allowed me to think about fundamental things about light and its absence, time, and how we are beings of light. Ive been doing a bit of quantum physics reading recently and I think im right in saying that everything that comes into contact with light is also affected by time (some things are not affected by either). Time is a physical process with emotional effects. Things can be inane and profound at the same time. This work is maybe about that.
Two Queens @twoqueensleicester is a work in progress and it always has been and always will be. I’m thinking about a quantum physics idea I read in the last week: ‘an object is a monotonous process’. Some objects are less monotonous than others.
2Q is having an open studios this Saturday, 6th July, 12-5pm - I won’t be there sadly, but we are also doing a bit of an open studios online this week too, so this is my contribution.
These images are just a tiny bit of about a million from a big trawl through old phone pics on old hard drive between about 2012-17. Maybe of interest to those who remember, or those who have come to 2Q more recently to see how its changed over time. Also posting because we are trying to save 2Q and put it in community ownership, so that it can continue to be a work in progress forever more, and maybe become warm and accessible and a nice place to be all year round.
When we first moved in in 2012 we thought we would only be there for 3 months, so everything was built in a way that could be very easily taken down again and moved. We spoke to the technicians at university about how the studio walls were made, and copied that system, which meant custom making a load of metal brackets. Over time those temporary walls started to get built over and reinforced and encrusted and moved around, and we started to make more permanent things. Some things we knocked down or knocked out. I think doing all this satisfies the part of my brain that liked to build dens as a child.
Every time a wall comes down or moves it opens up the space and I get a memory of what it was like when we moved in and there was nothing there. Looking back through these also makes me think about the different people who have come through the doors and dwelled here in the past decade, the eras where there are different studio crews, who are the people who hang about and who moves on, what did the walls look like when they were here?
Link to the 2Q crowdfunder is in my bio and more details on the 2Q page. If you can chip anything in please do.
Tomorrow, 8th June, opening at Ilkon @ilkestoncontemporaryarts Ruby @rubywaagetownsendart has curated some of my metal tulips onto the wall as part of the group exhibition ‘D.I.Y’. When Ruby asked me what the Tulips were about I said “repetition, variation, nature and our part in shaping it and shifting it, tulips as one of the first commodities of early capitalism, boredom crafts, using old things to make new things” I want to make loads more of them but I need to get a jigsaw where the blade doesn’t fall out every 5 minutes. I wont be at the opening but if you are near Ilkeston maybe you would like to be there
Part of a painting by my grandad John Edward Kelly (1912-2005) in the background of an old family photograph. I’m increasingly aware that a large part of my practice is trying to recreate my partial memories of these paintings seen around his house and which I no longer have access to. I like to think he was a Sunday Modernist, theres maybe something of Léger or Stanley Spencer in these tubey arms and legs.
