Hugh Marwood
Monday, 11 August 2025
The City Paints Itself
Thursday, 31 July 2025
'We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid', At Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester
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Mona Hartoum, 'Hot Spot' (Detail) With Gallery View |
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Francesca Aninat, 'Interior/Exterior Field' (Detail) |
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Fiona Banner, 'Mirror Fin, Jaguar', Polished Aircraft Tail Fin, 2006 |
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Phyllida Barlow, 'Untitled: Disaster 5', Mixed Sculptural Media & Castors, 2010 |
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See Above |
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Doris Salcedo, 'Atrabiliaros', Shoes, Cow Bladder & Surgical Thread, 1996 |
More solemn are the shoes of the Latin American disappeared that Doris Salcedo obscures behind stitched viceral membranes, in her small 'Atrabiliaros' instillation. The context is different, but I find it impossible not to see echoes of the Nazi's 'final solution' here too, and ultimately, perhaps it all just boils down to a repudiation of humanity and the futile deletion of individuals in the end. Even more minimal and fleeting in their visual effects are Ayan Farah's stretched blanket pieces. Although resembling highly distilled abstract paintings, they are actually composed of chemical stains or collected dust, seemingly encapsulating as much time as they do materiality. By applying the residual traces of some implied cataclysm or unwanted transformation, to what should be the fabric of domestic comfort, Farah implies the ultimate fragility of whatever stable life we might attempt to construct. I'm reminded to some extent of the domestic linen that often litters the bombed-out apartments of Gaza, Syria, Kiev, wherever... but also of the grubby bedding of Leicester's own rough sleepers, or the lines of washing in the steel town of Consett, that I once observed from a train window, collecting choking brown dust, even as it dried.
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Ayan Farah, Blanket Pieces, 2011 |
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Ayan Farah, 'Nuuk', Sun-Bleached Copper & Dye on Stretched Blanket, 2011 |
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Ayan Farah, 'Eldfell', Volcanic Ash & Dye on Stretched Blanket, 2011 |
In passing, I'll just mention that all the images here were collected with my smashing new mirrorless camera (its a Canon, for those that care). Such toys don't exactly come cheap and I suppose it might seem like a profligate indulgence, were it not for the fact that I've always regarded a 'grown-up' camera as one of life's essentials. The old DSLR responsible for nearly every image on this blog to date, has effectively reached the end of its working life (bits are literally dropping off), and goes into retirement after perhaps a million depressions of its shutter. Here's hoping this new one lasts as well in the coming years. The fact that the dense text below is legible, from what was boiled-down to a pretty small JPEG file, suggests there's nothing too shabby about it so far. I just need to decipher all those menus now...
'We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid' continues until 19 October at: Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester, Lancaster Road, Leicester, LE1 7HA
Written without A.I. [For better or worse]
Saturday, 5 July 2025
Completed Painting: 'Deleuzian Cartography 7'
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'Deleuzian Cartography 7', Paper Collage, Acrylics & Mixed Media on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2025 |
Here's the next in my series of 'Deleuzian Cartography' hybrid paintings, 'Deleuzian Cartography 7'. This is the third produced in this 60 cm square format, and shares the same essential aesthetic as 'DC 5' & '6'. As with those, the piece presents as essentially monochromatic, albeit with numerous nuanced accents of additional colour within the dominant hue. Of course, the saturation levels are ramped-up considerably this time, making this one uncompromisingly, 'The Yellow One'.
Written without A.I. [For better or worse]
Sunday, 29 June 2025
Completed Painting: 'Deleuzian Cartography 6'
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'Deleuzian Cartography 6', Paper Collage, Acrylics & Mixed Media on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2025 |
This is the sixth of my ‘Deleuzian Cartography’ mixed media ‘paintings’, and the second to be completed on a panel of these dimensions. My thoughts about scale, as it relates to this imagery, can be read in my last post. Suffice it to say, nothing much has changed in that respect.
Clearly, the prevailing aesthetic of this piece is very similar to that of ‘DC 5’, as are the methods by which it was achieved. It appears that I am once more immersed in one of those series of variations on a theme/vocabulary, to which my work so often defaults. That’s fine - I’m clearly happy working this way and (hopefully) sufficiently aware of the dangers of empty repetition and self-defeating comfort zones to know when a particular well is running dry.
What has changed in this particular version is the nature of the primary motifs (being those that bob to the surface relatively late in the process of resolving the piece. Instead of some form of architectural schematic, here we have a series of five found LED circuit diagrams. If the perpetual flux of de/reteritorialisation within urban environments is a primary theme of this work, so too is the sense of flowing currents and information streams through which so much of that dynamic is facilitated. Each of the five figures may recall the regular geometry of buildings as described on the map, but clearly the infrastructure they represent is devoted purely to flow and transmission of information/alerts, as coded through the millions of winking LED lights that punctuate our world. In purely formal terms, the lexicon of circuit components also feels like a new addition to the overall vocabulary of the ‘Deleuzian Cartography’ work.
In this context, the small accents of silver which enlivened the almost monochromatic palette of ‘DC 5’ are allowed even freer reign here, (however poorly my photographs may reveal them). Notions of the quicksilver nature of electricity and the metallic glitter of cabling and circuitry seem fairly apposite here. There’s also something very interesting about the way metallics allow a painting to transform its appearance based purely on the incidence of light and the angle of view. I like the idea of inferring the shimmer of screen-based or illuminated imagery in such a pleasingly low-tech manner. In passing, I’m reminded that Jacqueline Humphries produced a series of silver paintings in the past. Now there’s a thought…
[Written without A.I. - for better or worse]
Friday, 30 May 2025
Completed Painting: 'Deleuzian Cartography 5'
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'Deleuzian Cartography 5', Paper Collage & Mixed Media on Panel, 600 mm x 600mm, 2025 |
As promised, here's the next 'Deleuzian Cartography' painting (can I still accurately describe works like these as 'paintings'? - I'm not sure). This is the first one to expand in scale, and it definitely feels like some kind of escape from the world of tiny pieces I've been inhabiting for rather too long. We're still not exactly talking huge here - this is a standard (for me) square format at dimensions I'd normally think of as 'medium'. Nevertheless, it's definitely pleasing to have a bit more real estate to work with again, and perhaps implies a boost in overall confidence levels too.
Given the cartographic impulses at play in these pieces, scale and expansiveness feel like key issues. As a mapping concept, scale feels fairly straightforward, although we can quickly find ourselves dealing with more the emotional/intuitive aspects of distancing, detail focus, personal relationship to specific terrain etc. In this context, I'd reference the familiar thrill of zooming-in/out in Google Maps, and the instantaneous changes in emotional relationship to territory it affords. I'm also reminded of Borges' very short story, 'On Exactitude in Science' [1.], in which an unnamed Empire produces a 'perfect' map at 1:1 scale, completely covering the terrain with its own representation, and rapidly rendering itself useless in the process. As usual, Borges unlocks a world of philosophical speculation with the most economical of means. A close inspection of my own 'DC' pieces reveals how the collaged/mulched cartographic fragments vary in scale dramatically, indicating the themes of simultaneity and dissolving territorialisation that I've tried to build into them. The intention is definitely not to accurately map things with any degree of overall continuity - exactly the opposite, in fact.
Spatially, it's hardly original to observe that there's only one endless map (ultimately adjusted to wrap around a globe), and a set of arbitrary decisions about how we chop it up. That alone has caused me to speculate what happens as one breaks those boundaries and crosses into the next portion of the chart. Clearly, there's no reasons why any expansion should result in a regular square/rectangular border. Indeed, it feels highly desirable that it shouldn't. To that ends, I've been working for quite a while (under the radar, admittedly,) to produce a variety of paper-based sheets using the same techniques and general aesthetic you see here, but stopping at the point one might term 'backgrounds'. The intention is ultimately to start stitching these together in order to work/map further onto the resulting composites.
What you see here, then, is a more direct stopgap attempt to increase scale by just building a bigger panel and getting on with it. Any reticence in launching into this had to do with uncertainties over the relative scale of individual marks/motifs and the effect that might have on an overall composition. At this stage, (and relatively modest zoom ratio), it appears that the problems are negligible. Given the found/digitised/highly mediated nature of my source imagery, there's not too much the scaling functions of a photocopier, or Photoshop, or even just an old-school OHP, can't overcome. Also, the degree of all-over 'Pollockisation' effects that seem inevitable as this kind of imagery increases in scale seem both enjoyable and appropriate so far. The often monumental examples of Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, etc. would suggest there's a long distance to travel yet in that respect.
In all honesty, I'm not really sure where all that caution and tentative uncertainty came from of late. However, I do know that if just chopping up larger bits of MDF, embracing risk and accident, and working as quickly as the method allows, are proven ways to break out of that - well then the answer is obvious...
[1.]: Jorge Luis Borges, 'On Exactitude in Science' (Trans. Andrew Hurley), From: 'The Aleph', London/NYC, 1949/1999
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
Completed Painting: 'Deleuzian Cartography 4'
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'Deleuzian Cartography 4', Paper Collage, Acrylics & Mixed Media on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm, 2024 |
My social media interactions have definitely dwindled in recent months, for a variety of reasons. I've certainly become bored by the sheer admin of it all (all that needless checking several times a day, and the sense of being 'available' at any hour). I've also found myself increasingly reluctant to participate in the perceived degradation of discourse and our 'culture' generally (or at least what I once thought it to be). Simultaneously, I've found myself redirecting my attention back towards more traditional sources of information (long-form music, books - remember them?), and also realising that there is still far too much unread literature, unheard music, and unrealised art activity awaiting me, to waste time feeding vampiric (American) social media platforms. I've only got so many years left to me now, after all - endless vacuous distraction is the last thing I need.
However, I guess it's important not to totally forget the small ways in which digital conduits may still prove useful/enlightening if rationed and consciously targeted. This blog was only really started as a potential showcase for my own creative endeavours in the first place, and there's no reason why it shouldn't continue to function as such from time to time. Making paintings might feel like a far more rewarding way to spend time than documenting and pontificating about them, but I'm not ready to make my practice a 100% inward-looking/onanistic undertaking quite yet.
In the light of which, here's a little painting that fell through the publicity cracks when I completed it a few months back. It's the fourth of the small 'Deleuzian Cartography' panels produced with some enthusiasm/energy, during the last weeks of 2024. In general terms, it certainly shares a common aesthetic and set of concerns with the previous three. However, this one perhaps feels a little cruder/more rapid in its execution. That probably reflects my desire to avoid mere repetition and also the fact that this one 'fought back a bit'. The version you see here was arrived at fairly quickly after an extended period of flailing and I was satisfied to simply leave things be, rather than pursuing further unnecessary refinement.
Since completing this one, I've been working consistently with a view to exploring the same visual vocabulary of these 'Deleuzian Cartography' pieces on a larger scale. Much of that time has been spent preparing raw materials with a more composite, pieced-together approach in mind. More directly, there are also two newly-completed panels that prove that sometimes the thing to do is to just make a bigger panel and get on with it, without wasting time anticipating the potential problems. I'll try to be a bit more proactive and timely about revealing them...
Wednesday, 23 April 2025
S.I.T.E. (Midlands Chapter): Location Re-Port 1.5 (M) - Case Closed
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All Original Images: West Leicester, April 2025 |
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All Photo-Manipulations: April 2025 |
https://hughmarwood.blogspot.com/2021/01/location-re-port-11.html
https://hughmarwood.blogspot.com/2021/08/site-midlands-chapter-location-re-port.html
https://hughmarwood.blogspot.com/2021/09/site-midlands-chapter-location-re-port.html
https://hughmarwood.blogspot.com/2022/09/site-midlands-chapter-location-re-port.html
https://hughmarwood.blogspot.com/2022/10/site-midlands-chapter-location-re-port.html