Varoom 32 – Teh Nw

Article from Varoom 32 by Rachel Gannon and Darryl Clifton

Illustration as a practice, as an idea, as a tool, is so powerful, charming and winsome, seeing it differently as an object or practice feels impossible. When the world is wrapped and framed by illustration, from children’s books to the engraving on gravestones, how can we use illustration to help us see illustration differently? It’s a project Darryl Clifton and Rachel Gannon set themselves in a major 2015 gallery show Mut Mut. In this feature they use the work in Mut Mut, and the film they made about the show, as a platform to explore new ways of seeing illustration.

 

See whole article here: VAROOM_32_Teh Nw

Introduction: The series of questions, thoughts, statements, proclamations and prompts in the article is derived from two projects, one called Immaterial Boundary[1] a short documentary film about ‘visionary’ Illustrative practice and the other, Mut Mut[2] a recent gallery based show foregrounding object-based work produced by [     ][3]. Some of the words are extracted directly from the interviews with the practitioners featured in Immaterial Boundary, others are deliberately twisted and misshapen by us. And all the rest come from us. It is a list.

[1] Immaterial Boundary features: Pablo Jones Soler, Anna Lomax, Peter Nencini and Jack Sachs. The film was produced by Darryl Clifton and Rachel Gannon. http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/immaterial-boundary

[2] The participants in the exhibition were: Laura Carlin, Darryl Clifton, Vallée Duhamel, Rachel Gannon, Pablo Jones Soler, Anna Lomax, Peter Nencini, Robert Nicol, Nous Vous, Jack Sachs. The exhibition was hosted by Assembly Point www.assemblypoint.xyz

“Mut Mut is a playful compression of the latin phrase mutatis mutandis meaning ‘the necessary changes having been made’. It reflects an observation that illustration practice is experiencing a necessary evolution. Moving away from the conventional context of contemporary Illustration, and it’s mediation through either print or screen, these illustrators fabricate ‘one off’ bespoke or sculptural pieces. The individual object relies on the audience to come to ‘it’ rather than ‘it’ go to the audience. This is a conscious and deliberate rejection of the ephemeral and the reproduced traditionally associated with commercial practice. Instead we see a move towards the concrete, the tangible and the physical.”

[3] We leave this space blank deliberately. The temptation would have been to describe all the practitioners as Illustrators and it is true that they were all educated through a discipline we call Illustration. It is also true to say that they work or have worked commercially and in response to a client led brief but to describe them, exclusively, as Illustrators is problematic. The participants in the film were: Pablo Jones Soler, Anna Lomax, Peter Nencini and Jack Sachs.

Carousel image: Installation View, Rachel Gannon, Dreamland, Cairo, detail, 2015 (foreground)

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