Large scale steel and aluminium sculpture. Public sculpture commissions, creative designs for theatre, interactive and kinetic productions.
Selected sculpture:
Sculpture in collections:
Meth V - Jerwood Sculpture Park
Sculpture for theatre:
The Whale - Talking Birds Theatre Company
The Oakmobile - Talking Birds theatre Company
Public sculpture projects:
LLandudno Junction War Memorial - North Wales
Middlewood Way Visitor Centre - Poynton
Fold out aluminium maps, an aid for identifying birds in flight at night. Art-Sense Commission.
The Oakmobile, created for Talking Birds Theatre Company, designed by Janet Vaughan. A mobile theatre designed to be towed and toured.
Public sculpture commission and residency. Created collaboratively with the local community to commemorate those lost from the town in both world wars. 76 aluminum triangular markers for every soldier, designed to be viewed best from the heavens.
Situated at the Nelson Pit Visitor Centre, commissioned by Macclesfield Council. Visually connnecting the lost industrial heriatge of the site, with a buily in map to aid location for lost mining sites in the area.
Mobile thatre, created for Talking Birds Theatre Company. The whales mouth opens, to let you in to your own one man theatre. Designed to be towed and toured.
Sculpture exhibited at the Henley-on-Thames Arts Festival in 1998. Sold. This the second version of Meth, the evolution continues.
The fifth and final incarnation of the Meth. Winner of the Jerwood West Midlands Sculpture prize. Now residing at Ragley Hall Sculpture Park.
I perform live (or dead) as a failed rocket scientist, who may or may not be Wernher Von Braun. What is certain is that he can communicate with birds, dead or alive. Using analogue technology, typewriters, morse code ciphers he conducts seances and lost conversations with the birds.. usually wagtails, occasionally woodpeckers, but always black and white. Its a monochrome world out there.
This perfomance is an audience participation event where a means of communicating and creating a dialogue with the dead scientist are made open to the audience. The perfomance takes place on a specific laboratory built to live within the performance space.
Excerpt from perfomance:
I am born for seeing,
Employed to watch,
Sworn to the tower,
I delight in the world.
I see what is far,
I see what is near,
The moon and the stars,
The sea and the birds.
For my Meteorit ØY performance at the ØY Festival 2018, Wernher was alone on Mars with only an Oracular Woodpecker for company. Adrift on an island planet with no water, the need for my island became less and less, I was occupied now in sending it back to earth, stone by stone. A meteorite in reverse, but this time in stone instalments.
Excerpt from perfomance:
Surrounded by an eye blue.
Sea.
Of lost stones.
On a grey shore.
With my red feet.
On a diminishing island
Of grey Allalonestones
With only a black and white.
Bird.
The Geirfugl.
For company.
Selected performance:
For All That Falls From The Sky (Meteorit ØY) - ØY Festival - Papa Westray. 2018
Double Lives – Malt Cross – Nottingham. 2011
Three Evenings With Wernher - Marlborough College. 2009
Two Evenings With Wernher – Sideshow Festival – Bournemouth. 2009
An Evening With Wernher – Plan 9 Gallery – Bristol. 2009
Performance at the Side show Festival, Bournemouth. My laboratory designed specifically for the space, which in this case was an underground car park.
This performance took place over three nights at Marlborough College, the laboratory was screened from the audience with a curtain of punched pianola paper. With access and communication made possible through a door and letter box.
Photo credit - David Allen
Marlborough College performance. Wernher is seen here waiting for the birds to arrive, a broken arm doubling up as a useful perch for the incoming avians. The rockets leave as the birds arrive.
Photo credit - David Allen
ØY Festival 2018 saw Wernher alone on Mars with only a dead woodpecker for company, His dream of finally making out to the red planet had come true, but perhaps not in the manner he had thought.
15 min spoken word performance, with an island of stones, morse code cipher and pre-recorded message from Wernher.
I first visited Papay in 2013 on a pilgrimage to see the home of the last British breeding pair of the now extinct Great Auks. Little did I know that less than a year later I would be living permanently on Papay and just beginning my role as the Papay Ranger.
I took hundreds of photographs on that first visit…mostly through horizontal rain and gale force winds as I walked the islands coastline. This was a whole new world for me.
Unintentionally I have created a photographic diary of my time on the island, with all the wonderful memories and spontaneous events that have occured on this small island in the North.
I always carry two cameras a Nikon D500 with a 500mm lens for the birds (and the occasional butterfly or cetacean), and at the other end of the spectrum my iphone for everything else, landscapes, video and limpets.
I never really go out to specifically photograph anything, but with my cameras with me all the time I just react to what appears on the island. It could be on a guided tour, just out for a walk, or hopefully catching sight of a passing migrant bird.
Most of my photographs end up on Instagram and Facebook. They portray a vibrant island with fantastic wildlife and landscapes. A place where visitors want to travel to and see and experience Papay for themselves.
I have undertaken artist residencies in varying locations including colleges, galleries and prisons. With different timespans from 3 weeks to a year.
I look to transform the space I reside in, collaborate with the environment and the society in which I inhabit. Creating spaces to interact with, be inquistive about and to wonder at.
Residencies inform my practise and create challenges and suituations that challenge my work, for example my live performance work was born of my residency at Marlborugh College. To increase my intearction with students at the college i built my own studio in the middle of their art studio, with walls made from perspex my work and my everyday routine became a live and ever changing performance.
Selected residency locations:
Marlborough College - Wiltshire
Florence Trust - Highbury - London
Take Over at the Pumphouse Gallery - London.
Woodfield School - Coventry
Wednesfield High School - Wolverhampton