Art Work
New Images
On going work in 20019
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Paradise is always where you've been. Artist Book
From a review of 'Paradise is Always Where You've Been' by Andrew Eason more…
From a review of 'Paradise is Always Where You've Been' by Andrew Eason
in 'Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005'
...."I pick up this book with its heavy wooden covers. There's a hole in the front of the book. I take a deep breath and heave myself into it, descending (if that is the right word) into the torments of paradise. Its a tight squeeze, and when I make it I'm not sure that I don't prefer my previous world. At least there I have luxuries. I can wear the shroud of ignorance from time to time.
My guide is a dog. A survivor, but not a reassurance. An accomplished accompanist, his howl counterpoints the main themes and drags my attention around as I bump along the bottom. I'm bombarded with texts and images that seem to burst all around me like shells. There's no peace here, not even in the fabrics of the body itself. The appeal to Gerard Manley Hopkins 'Windhover', usually a source of satisfied perfection in nature, is winged: a hurt hawk spirals down and is consumed. There' hunger, destruction, death, accusation.
Paradise though. There are tiny glimpses of what has failed. It just makes the absence
harder to bear. There are territories, loves, losses touched upon. There was supposed to be a design to which everything conformed. There was supposed to be justice: here the notion is poked fun at. It's just another criterion in God's box-ticking management style, and subject to change without notice. But power remains. There's plenty of that, for those that have it, and precious little for those that don't. The only power left to some is the accusation their bodies make after their death. Their power is in a vacuum made by their removal from life. The dog's howling again. I wonder that he has the breath, so rarefied has the atmosphere become. Most of the oxygen taken up by burning or sucked into the lungs of the weeping survivors. Power doesn't seem to need the air but would deny it to those that do.
"Why?" takes breath to say,.......
........Sykes has kept the book "in the Terrestrial here and now" not in Dante's heaven, there's no escape from the profound moral flimsiness that seems to be part of being mortal.
Paradise is always where you've been also suggests that the only safe haven for perfection is in the past, in memory. Beyond the reach of the powers to contain or control it, or subvert it to its ends. It doesn't insist that there ever was a good place to be in the past, just that its now as untouchable as the possible outcomes of action are, somewhere out there in the future."
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The Secret History of British Birds
The secret History of British Birds is a series of unique drawings on paper using mixed media. approx 33x33 cm.
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The Comedy Series
The Comedy more…
The Comedy
medium Pen and ink drawings on Paper
size 57cm x 57cm
'The Comedy' is part of a large body of work called ''The Dante Series' of prints, drawings, paintings and an artist's book titled 'Paradise is Always Where You''ve Been'.
The ideas behind 'The Dante Series' are linked to themes from the 15th century poet Dante's 'Divine Comedy' and investigates questions of identity and loss in our
contemporary world. Our wish to fly and our feelings of floating at times of distress through bereavement, war, natural disaster and accident are a catylist for the imagery.
'The Comedy is a series of 40 drawings and were produced with pen and ink and white acrylic on Heritage paper. In keeping with her own mental and physical feelings after a deep personal loss the figures do not touch the ground or walls but float in an unreal and unststed space. They gaze through mirrors and windows as onlookers and are reflected back as insubstantial shadows. There is no connection in the drawings between humans or objects. Only a hovering isolation permeares the surface of the paper. Nevertheless there are hints of humour and a sense of hope. Each piece of work is accompanied by a short text from the book ''Hell : Dante Aligheri' which was translated by the poet Steve Ellis.
A citation based on the exhibition and catalogue,'Literature in the Art of Sandy Sykes' by the poet George Szirtes was published in 'Modern Painters' Winter 1998
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Dwelling
'Dwelling Series' 2006/2008 more…
'Dwelling Series' 2006/2008
'Dwelling' is a series of 21 drawings using pencil and ink as the simplest of means to reveal the complex relationship between their drawn elements. Tents and human kites are held to the surface with line anchors, providing refuge and hope, the prospect of a new history from a tortured world. Each drawing speaks on an individual basis yet adds to the debate of the whole.
Dwellings 1 to 12 are a series of pencil drawings 62cm x 45cm on Somerset paper.
Dwellings 13 to 15 are a series of 3 drawings using pen and ink, pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic. They measure 150cm x 120cm.
Dwellings 16 to 21 are a series of 6 drawings using pen and ink, pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic, measuring 100cm x 75cm.
In January/February 2006 on a residency at 'firstsite' Contemporary Art Colchester
Sykes produced and exhibited a series of pencil, ink and watercolour drawings titled 'Dwelling'. These and subsequent drawings were exhibited at Rabley Contemporary Drawing Centre, Marlborough, Wiltshire in July and August 2006.
Sykes was selected from over 400 international applications for a Solo exhibition in one of the larger Project Spaces at the London Art Fair 2007, Business Design Centre London, Where she showed the 'Dwelling' Series alongside other recent work.
Photos of tents and temporary dwellings appear often in our newspapers and are a catalyst for the drawn imagery, which combines the tragedy of flood, eruption, war and disaster with hints of humour and our human capacity to find laughter through tears.
Echoes lie around in the terrain of these drawings, people and objects erased but refusing to be rubbed out. They haunt the spaces, creating absences, suggestions of things that were and things that might have been.
From a review by Mel Gooding
" Everything Sandy Sykes makes has complex and complicated relations with everything else she makes"
From a review by Meryl Ainslie
"New 'Dwelling' Drawings of Kites, Tents, Refugees and a Dog at a Gate!"
"In Sandy Sykes drawings, prints and artists books history, fact and fiction blur into new mythologies. There are fragments of real lives, situations, agonies and loves. Drawn fragments of clips from books, newspapers and Sykes mind are imbedded into her poetic compositions. Sykes ideas have a political edge but retain a quirky and often humorous perspective- iconoclastic sequences of the blind leading the blind appear and reappear in a gesture of defiant humanity and hope. She evokes a rollercoaster of human emotions that will make you cry and laugh in equal parts."
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Ambush
A series of 20 pencil drawings on thin hand made Indian paper in a variety of sizes. Ten or more are 38cm x 51cm whilst others are elongated horizontally to evoke the idea of the wall painting or frieze. As this series develops Sykes concentrates on front line victims co-opted into the service of war by structures of power. Through media coverage, current battlefields become one with false notions and legends of former times displayed in early American films. Drawing the comic turmoil of cowboy games of war, the fixed, funny and formal postures of the perpetrators revolve slowly in the mythical morass to reveal more realistic, believable figures of contemporary soldiers and civilians, children and animals, in attack or surrender stance. Historic versions of mounted warriors from the Bayeaux Tapestry or medieval battlefields occur to echo the never- ending repetition of human warfare. more…
A series of 20 pencil drawings on thin hand made Indian paper in a variety of sizes. Ten or more are 38cm x 51cm whilst others are elongated horizontally to evoke the idea of the wall painting or frieze. As this series develops Sykes concentrates on front line victims co-opted into the service of war by structures of power. Through media coverage, current battlefields become one with false notions and legends of former times displayed in early American films. Drawing the comic turmoil of cowboy games of war, the fixed, funny and formal postures of the perpetrators revolve slowly in the mythical morass to reveal more realistic, believable figures of contemporary soldiers and civilians, children and animals, in attack or surrender stance. Historic versions of mounted warriors from the Bayeaux Tapestry or medieval battlefields occur to echo the never- ending repetition of human warfare.
'Ambush: 11' was selected for the Jerwood Art Prizes Exhibition 2009
opening at The Jerwood Space London then travelling in Britain.
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Shooting History
Cover Me Series
The concerns in these drawings are related to persistent newspaper coverage of slaughter, mayhem and disaster. So prevalent and explicit are the pictures we feed off every day that we are no longer troubled by the images and our retention of the visual information is cursory and dismissive. more…
The concerns in these drawings are related to persistent newspaper coverage of slaughter, mayhem and disaster. So prevalent and explicit are the pictures we feed off every day that we are no longer troubled by the images and our retention of the visual information is cursory and dismissive.
Drawing the comic turmoil of cowboy games of war, the fixed, funny and formal postures of the perpetrators revolve slowly in the mythical morass to reveal more realistic, believable figures of contemporary soldiers in attack or surrender stance. Flashed in the starkness of static action for tabloid consumption they are transformed and transcended in pencilled immutability. Unspecified uniforms lead to questions of guilt or innocence, friend or foe, hero or villain. Whose side are they on?
Using pencil and black acrylic on thin and uneven Khadi Indian paper, a hand rubbed, woodcut printed text is also evident. Taking the phrase "A woodpecker hammered at a drainpipe" from Cormac McCarthy's poetic novels of the early American West, the line points to the futility of the action and the desperation of the bird. In the context of the drawing courageous endeavour towards the destruction of human life is rendered equally absurd. Landscape, dwelling and eons of time are implied by the text but not seen.
Though the images are ciphers, the personalizing of the tanks is redolent of 17th century Persian battle drawings of armies described with infinite detail. Surrounded by buildings with tiny windows they
reveal minute scenes of domestic life co-existing with the violence outside.
Repetition and changes of scale lend pattern and restrained movement to the spatial compression. The slow speed of the reading invites intimacy within the formally distanced panorama as we, the viewers, unfold the visual saga and convoluted argument. Whose side are you on?
"Cover Me Series" of 24 drawings 2008
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Border Drawings
'Border Series' 2008 more…
'Border Series' 2008
Size 31cm x 31 cm approx.
'Borders' is a series of 21 drawings in pencil on collaged and gessoed hand made paper. Each half of the paper is a different rough texture creating slight differences in the rendering of the subject matter and irregular edges to the pieces. The imagery is sourced from newspapers, libraries and a lifetime of artist's sketchbooks. They relate and were made alongside the 'Manuscript' and 'Margin' series.
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Manuscript
The 'Manuscript' Series more…
The 'Manuscript' Series
These hand-burnished woodcuts are a series of 20 unique prints titled 'Manuscript'. Measuring approximately 100cm x 150cm on constructed panels of fragile Indian ecological paper they are multi-layered, and complex of surface. Using wood and lino cuts, etched metal and plastic surfaces alongside tissue and assorted papers, a palimpsest of chine-colle and collage, repeated rubbings and transfers evolve into wilderness and unfolding time.
Taking the words from Cormac McCarthy's novel 'Child of God', they refer obliquely to the changes in landscape and the repercussions on humans who inhabit the land. Cormac McCarthy's poetic novels are mainly set in the wilds of the early American west where values decline and populations drift and change. His novel 'The Road' was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2008.
Research into literature and imagery from many different cultures, and the study of manuscripts defaced and decomposing, burnt or worm eaten (in the British Library) has further inspired this latest series of prints. Begun in 2007/8/9 they allude to 'boundaries', they incorporate margins in the imagery and refer to the margins of our territory and our morals. As more of our climate degrades our need for toleration and understanding will be taxed to the edge.
'Manuscript 6: Doll', 'Manuscript 2: Tracks', 'Manuscript 3: Ice' and 'Manuscript 20: Inscribed' are the four prints chosen to win the Rector of Poznan Award at the 'International Print Triennial Krakow' Poland in 2009. 'Manuscript 2: Tracks' is in the prestigious Krakow Print Archive.
Images and an essay on the 'Manuscript Series' by Richard Noyce can be seen in the book 'Critical Mass; Printmaking Beyond the Edge' by Richard Noyce.
Images and an essay by Sandy Sykes, on the influence of landscape and history on the 'Manuscript Series' can be found in 'Printmakers' Secrets' by Anthony Dyson
Images and an essay on 'Manuscript 17: Bird Call' and 'Manuscript 3: Ice' can be read in the book 'How Artists See East Anglian Places' Edited by Ruby Ormerod, Green Pebble Publications 2010
Reproductions of these prints can be found in many reviews and catalogues.
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The Flying Itself
Unique prints produces originally for a solo show at Rabley Drawing Center 2013. The prints are woodcuts and mixed media. You may buy online through the gallery or from Sandy Sykes. Price: 1800 pounds sterling,unframed.
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Margin Collages
'Margin Series' Size 34 x 31cm (approx) more…
'Margin Series' Size 34 x 31cm (approx)
'Margin' is a series of 21 unique works on paper. The surfaces were constructed into finely balanced compositions from a variety of handmade Indian papers of varying colours and textures before the drawing, painting and printed images were applied.
Imagery and words are sourced from newspapers, libraries, a lifetime of artists sketchbooks and hand-cut lino and wood blocks.
These lend repetition, pattern and recognition through the simultaneous development of the prints. They suggest narratives of endless possibilities, witty and dark.They relate to the 'Border' series of drawings and to the 'Manuscript' prints.
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new woodcuts 2018
Unique prints
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