A few weeks back I had an email from a friend who told me that a random mail invite featuring one of my photographs had landed on his desk at Bauer Media up in Peterborough. The invite was to a photography event called Ffotography Futures, part of the Creative Capitol events at Canary Wharf, London. I had no idea what it was all about and much confusion ensued until I received a phonecall from my old uni tutor explaining all. I'd been invited as one
of the top photographic alumni of the University of Wales (!) to
be a part of their new art and commerce project called nu:studio
and since I was planning on being in London with C that week anyway, we rejigged our plans to coincide with the launch.
For the first time in my life I joined the early morning squish of the London underground commute and took the tube to this huge corporate hell of a place where
everyone has pallid skin & carries a
Blackberry & bashes your knees with their briefcase as you all zombie march together towards the escalators. I was super early so was banished by the doorman to an underground pit of polyester suited despair where I was served up a cup of corporate hate by the rudest
Italian in Canary Wharf. Lovely.
Thankfully the actual event was far more welcoming! After getting signed in and dropping off my bag (containing my trainers - I'm not hardcore business enough to wear heels all day long yet!) I hit the tea & biscuits buffet, saw a few people I knew and introduced myself to the ones I
didn't; Stuart Bailes and Faye Gibson were there as well
as our old tutor Geraint Cunnick. And I met Michal Iwanowski (who it turned out I had
actually met at an exhibition at Chapter a few weeks previous) and a retoucher called Liz Richmond who
was tiny & gorgeous & extremely talented. After a spot of networking (& more biscuit eating) we all took our seats in front of three
giant Canon digital screens that imposed upon the entire front half of
the room. Various people talked about the importance of engaging young, creative talent in professional industries and I got a small, nerdy kick out of watching my work get projected so big! By
and large, the most important person there was Francis Hodgson and he
didn't disappoint; engaging, intelligent, perceptive... fantastic! I was introduced to him at the end and plonked one of my best looking busines cards into his hand.
We finished with an elaborate buffet and they cracked open the wine at
11am which was a shame as I absolutely cannot drink so early in the
morning. I snuck away during a random fashion show and went back to
the hotel with C for a little nap as I am terrible at getting up early
and completely non-functional without enough sleep. The rest of our London jolly involved tea & sandwiches & all the silly little things I enjoy about going away. Our hotel on Edgeware Road; a nondescript glass fronted place, completely indistinguishable on a a street of indian supermarkets, fruit stalls, electrical shops and creepy collection boxes for 1970s blind children charities. Wandering around Soho, eating strawberry tart at Maison-Bertaux, checking out a the vintage guitar shops and then over to Oxford Street so I could fail to splurge on the disappointing selection of centenary celebration products at Selfridges. Pulling my cardigan over the goosebumps on my arms and slipping my hand under C's elbow as the wind picked up. He's warm & smokey but he hardly ever wears any kind of aftershave and I find it strange not to have a boy-perfume reference to place him. Dinner at an all you can eat Chinese buffet in Soho. Trying to find a place to drink afterwards was frustrating as locating decent bars in London has never been my strong point and C has no sense of direction. We caught the tube to Angel for the Dan Auerbach & the Fast Five gig at the Academy. Oh. My. Word. AMAZING! Opening with "Oh-oh-oh, I want some more," prowling the stage on some kind of animalistic post narcotic sex stomp, guitar straps glittering, beautiful lighting, TWO drummers and dirty harmonies. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ After the show we bought beers & sweets & fruit from the Sainsbury's over the road and took them back to the hotel. Finally a huge breakfast, tube to the Saatchi gallery (closed for a private view), stroll around Chelsea, coffee at Patisserie Valerie where we saw Davina McCall, Habitat & furniture shops, stumbling across a gorgeous little church park full of pigeons, walking to Kensington, V&A for a few hours, Harrods for cake then picking up our bags and catching the train home.
So, if you're interested; nu:studio is a Newport School of Art, Media & Design project that provides professional
services to the creative industries including consultancy, training, career and business development. Things to do on the nu:studio website:
But don't go to the Cafe Nero in Canary Wharf. It sucks.
Eeek! There's only one day left to sign up for this year's PHOTOMARATHON event. Taking place on Saturday 20th June, PHOTOMARATHON is part photographic competition, part endurance test! Registered participants meet up bright and early at 10am at Cardiff's Millennium Centre where they are given a 12 exposure film and sent on their merry way to shoot 12 different topics over 12 hours. All you need is a 35mm camera and the stamina for a day long improvisational photo jolly! The topics are kept secret and revealed every four hours. Each entrant must personally collect the set of topics from HQ and have their entry card stamped to proove attendance. There's plenty of room for interpretation and creativity and imagination is far more important than technical ability. At the end of the day all the films are collected for processing and printing and a panel of judges will meet to pick the winners. Prizes on offer are a CANON 1000D Digital SLR with 18-55mm lens, photobook vouchers and enlargments of your prints. But my favourite part is that every single photo taken on the day will go on show at a free public exhibition... lots and lots of photos! Entry is £15 and you can sign up here.
The editorial I shot for Barcelona based magazine D+ has gone to print at last! I love the muted tones and the way Rosie sinks into the darkness in these pictures. The PDFs look fantastic and I'm looking forward to seeing it in print when my copy arrives. Thank you Rosie and D+ for giving me such a gorgeous tear sheet to add to the collection.
A few weekends ago, on Sunday 3rd May, Flick & I did the London Zine Symposium, there and back in a day... again. She just about missed the coach and I had to hold it up under unbearably tense pressure, panicking down the phone, animated & excitable, standing on my seat watching out the window for the approach of her boyfriend's car whilst the bus driver waited next to me, drumming his fingers on her empty seat. Once again the symposium was at the Rag Factory on Brick Lane although this year we were in a much nicer, sunshine-y building, white tiled like a bathroom with a shower in the toilet! There was much more room for wandering around between stalls although it did feel a little stilted to have the tables divided between two rooms.
I love the food in the Spitalfields area. In the morning I went on an epic mission for my beloved almond croissants, taking in two markets before I finally tracked down a stall that had some left. Later on we bought the delicious salad, pitta & tahini lunch provided by the zine people for £1.50 and ate sat outside on the curb in Brick Lane, people watching. There were vegan cakes, workshops, readings and the Footprint Workers Co-op were down from Leeds with a load of copy gear, putting together the pages from the collaborative zine. For a while I was chuckling to myself about the nature of zine events being crammed full of socially awkward people... how ironic that so many of them come together in such a tight squish of a place where they have no choice but to interact. An amusing observation until the moment I realised, I too am one of the socially awkward at times! Reluctant to make smalltalk, unsure of what exactly is to be done with flailing alien arms yet altogether far too aware of the comparative height of chair to table and whether anyone else is as freaked out by it as myself. Oh dear. Fun times though, all bumbling about together!
Chris of Herman Peaks totally had the best t-shirt at the symposium! I picked up some ace stuff; Tukru's new zine, 'Your Pretty Face is Going Straight to Hell #8', the cover of which features a unicorn sicking a rainbow! Chris Taylor's entire back catalogue of 'Cognitive Dissonance' comics - amazing, you MUST buy them! I read them all on the coach on the way home. I never really considered myself to be one for comics before but these are something else... witty, dry, wrong... awesome! What else? More of Scott Smith's zines - whilst reading these it is entirely possible to pee yourself laughing (TENA Lady ahoy!). And lots of little bits & pieces from the 60+ stalls that were there on the day.
I'm looking for an assistant (available on the 1st of June) to help shoot a hair photography campaign for an award winning young stylist. The pictures will be used as promotional material for his salon and as a competition entry at the UK Hairdressing Awards. It will be a full day's shoot incorporating an avant-garde session in the morning and a more commercial 'street' session in the afternoon. It will be a very busy, long and hectic day with lots of hairdressers, stylists, models and all sorts running around the place. I'm interested in someone who is willing to get stuck in and help out with the boring bits, rather than someone who will try to take over the shoot with their own creative vision! Basically helping me with the lights, keeping the studio clean & tidy, helping the stylists/models, making tea, maybe popping to the shops to get bits & pieces if anything goes drastically wrong. Preferably I'd like someone with some experience of using studio lighting, taking meter readings... that sort of thing.
Soul Catch Fire.
Soul
Catch Fire is a story of sorts; of men, muses and slightly mad love. Each 14 page zine features eight mini photographic prints and a few photocopied words to help move things
along.
B7 in size.
Limited to an edition of 30.
Available now at my Etsy.
A few weeks ago I had a table at the Ffotogallery Book Arts Fayre at Turner House in Penarth, Cardiff. The fayre happens once a quarter and it's so exciting for me to finally have a regular zine event so close to home. Despite being slightly worse for wear on arrival after a few too many mojitos at my exhibition opening the night before, I soon perked up. Once again I was sharing a table with Wes White of Attack!!! zine and we had a steady flow of visitors throughout the afternoon, both browsing and buying.
Ffotogallery on a sunny day is the perfect location for a zine event. There was a marquee over the benches on the front lawn, free tea & coffee, amazing triple chocolate cherry cupcakes and all the usual yummy vegan goodies for 50p, The room was bright and warm and the wall art from the current exhibition was so beautiful. Tim Brennan's, 'English Anxieties,' is collated from the various ephemera of a mass observation project of an English town in the late 1930s. The project's original objective was to create a sort of 'anthropology' of the self by recording people's everyday thoughts, conversations and behaviour. Brennan had presented the research as a thematically sectioned artists book, dismantled and displayed in glass cases. Reflecting upon the archives in this way, the paranoia and anxieties of the English people in such uncertain times was apparent and at times, almost amusing. In the afternoon we joined the artist in the upper mezzanine level where he initiated a group discussion on the nature of book works in art and everyone talked a little about why they do what they do. After a cheeky laze around on the grass outside while Wes minded the stall, the last half hour was spent polishing off the cakes and spending money on other people's zines. Finally, we took a quick wander along the pebble beach to the pier which is rusty & run down in the best possible way!
The next Book Arts Fayre is scheduled for Saturday 15th August and it would be ace to see even more people there next time around. If you're interested in having a stall or just helping out you can contact the gallery at turnerhouse@ffotogallery.org and I'm sure someone will give you all the information you need to get involved.
Look! A blog at long last! Thank you for your patience during my seemingly endless fussing around with the new website. Typically, now I have found five minutes to settle down with the laptop and tell you what I've been up to, all the world's shoutiest men have appeared outside my window. The only thing worse than a crowd of shouty men is a crowd of shouty men 'singing' football songs. Hmm.
I've spent the past few weeks decorating my studio, launching an exhibition at the Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport (it lights up different colours at night!), shooting an editorial for a magazine in Barcelona, photographing local bands for a magazine feature, making a new photo book and tabling at Brighton Zine Fest, Ffotogallery's Book Arts Fayre and London Zine Symposium. There are so many things I am excited to blog about but for now I just wanted to say a quick hello.
So, hello!
x
