Troy Town is pleased to announce that our next artist in residence is Colin Self (b. 1941)
Colin Self is one of the original English pop artists. He began working in the early 1960s, and through a seven-decade career Self has long been seen as the ‘Political conscience’ of a scene which largely dealt with consumerist imagery and explorations of mass media. As opposed to the majority of his peers, Self’s work from the sixties onwards dealt explicitly with the existential and sociopolitical strains of the so-called ‘cold war’. An early example of this being his drawings of American fallout shelters, crude models of nuclear bombers, and his piece ‘The Nuclear Victim (Beach Girl)’. The latter was first shown at the ICA’s inaugural exhibition ‘The Obsessive Image’ in 1968, alongside a version of Paul Thek’s celebrated ‘Tomb: Death of a Hippy’ installation.
Self’s deep devotion to printmaking and drawing led the artist Richard Hamilton to call him ‘the best draughtsman in England since William Blake’. In the 1970s, Self began a working partnership with the potter Mathies Schwarz in Germany, producing many ceramic sculptures together. For his residency at Troy Town, Self will be producing a number of unrealised sculptures from this period, based on drawings from contemporaneous sketchbooks.
Colin Self lives and works in Norwich. Except for brief representation by Robert Fraser, Self has operated for his entire career as an independent artist. Self has never used a computer or mobile phone.
Troy Town would like to thank Colin, his family and in particular Coleen Self for their support in realising this project.
Slide 1: Portrait of Colin Self, 1972, Norway
Slide 2: Colin Self - Nuclear Victim (Beach Girl), mannequin and mixed media, 1966
Slide 3: Colin Self - Gardens with Green Garden Sculpture, pencil on paper, 1966-9
Slide 4: L-R - Colin Self, Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser, Brian Jones, and dancers at Fraser’s gallery, c. 1966
Slide 5: Colin Self - Leopardskin Nuclear Bomber No. 2, mixed media, 1963
Slide 6: Colin Self -Bowl on Fist, ceramic, 1972
Slide 7: Colin Self - Empty Cinema (St. Valentine’s Day Massacre), pencil on paper, 1968
@colself @troy.town 
