1984 at DACS

1984 is an exhibition celebrating twenty five years of the Design and Artist's Copyright Society who are a copyright and collecting society for artist's and visual creators. The exhibition opens on 27th May 2009 in the society's own gallery space, The Kowalsky Gallery 33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V and runs until 21 August 2009. Other exhibitors include Tracey Emin, Peter Blake, David Nash and Holly Johnson. For more information about DACS visit here.

The Uncommon Reader

The Uncommon Reader is an exhibition that explores the wide-ranging literary associations in the work of Tom Phillips. Featured here are his illustrations to Plato’s Symposium, Ulysses and to his own translation of Dante’s Inferno. Also included in the exhibition are portraits of writers such as Samuel Beckett, David Rudkin and Salman Rushdie, a book jacket design for Iris Murdoch and a fragment of The Library at Elsinore installation. Tom Phillips is well known for works that combine text with image. In this exhibition we see some recent sculptures in wire made from pure lettering that quote from Henry James and from Wittgenstein's Tractacus. Also on display will be a selection from the artist’s enormous photographic postcard archive project, We Are The People, on the theme of readers
The exhibition will be open to the public from 24 October to 15 November 2009 at the Garden Gallery of The Oxfordshire Museum as part of the Art in Woodstock festival.

Printmaking

Two new books on printmaking will feature works by Tom Phillips. Printmakers Secrets by Anthony Dyson is published on 30th May 2009 and Hybrid Prints by Megan Fishpool follows on 3rd June 2009. Both are available from Amazon.

For Robert Burns

A new print by Tom Phillips is exhibited in the group show Inspired which celebrates the life and work of Robert Burns on the 250th anniversary of his birth. The silkscreen and epson print, a newly worked page from Phillips's treated Victorian novel A Humument, is titled For Robert Burns with Best Wishes from Elvis Presley.
Inspired is at the Old Reading Hall at The Mitchell Library, Glasgow. It opened on 4th April 2009 and runs until 20th September 2009.
The exhibition features contemporary works of art alongside several Burns relics. The contemporary pieces are primarily new unseen works by artist's such as Tracy Emin, The Chapman Brothers and Peter Howson.
An online version of the exhibition can be seen here.

Tom Phillips's drawings to The Ashmolean Museum

The University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum have recently acquired a major collection of drawings by Tom Phillips. These range from his very earliest student drawings made whilst at St. Catherine's College and at Camberwell School of Art to works completed within the last year. A significant part of the acquisition are over a hundred original drawings that made up the 1995 book Merry Meetings, exhibited at The Ashmolean as part of Tom Phillip's Micro Retrospective in the same year. The cover illustration is shown above. Other recent works include a study for the Samuel Johnson fifty pence piece design (2005), a drawing for the Cardinal Newman mosaic now installed at Westminster Cathedral and one of Phillips's stage designs for The Magic Flute at Holland Park last summer.

Armed Forces Memorial at Westminster Abbey

On Wednesday 29th October at Westminster Abbey a memorial designed by Tom Phillips to those killed on duty in the armed forces since the Second World War was unveiled by the Princess Royal.
You can read about the making of the work at the artist's blog.

In an artist's statement Tom Phillips explains:
This memorial takes the form of a text (adapted from that provided by the Armed Services Memorial committee) worked in welded steel so that the letters of which it is made support and strengthen each other in free space. With this structural interdependence and the presence of steel, the generic material of ordnance, a military metaphor is tacitly present. This is symbolically reinforced by the overall covering given to the metal which is made up from earth gathered world-wide (with the assistance of travelling friends) from various sites of conflict. These date from 1066 (Battle itself) via Agincourt, the Somme and onwards to the present day. Fifteen such earth samples were mixed and ground together to make a pigment bound in colourless acrylic resin. Thus, in an echo of Rupert Brooke's famous poem, "some corner(s) of a foreign field" are brought to an appropriate place to indicate the long ancestry of national courage. The not unexpected resemblance in colour and granular texture to rust could be thought quietly to voice the artist's hope of an ultimate peace.

Framing the metal sculpture and beginning similarly with the all important word 'remember' is the motto of the Armed Services Memorial Appeal carved into the fabric of the Abbey itself, a stone that is the same as that used throughout the world by the War Graves Commission. The carving is made as deep as is practicable to catch the maximum amount of defining shadow.

Thus the services and their dead are memorialised in bonded steel camouflaged in the earth of battle with a surrounding call to remembrance marked in sanctified stone.

Follow these links to see how the event was reported.
Westminster Abbey
BBC News
ITN News
This is London
Mail on Sunday
Choice FM
This is Nottingham

Less is More: the Poetics of Erasure

Less is More: the Poetics of Erasure
November 1 – December 12, 2008
SFU Gallery, Burnaby Campus
Panel Dicussion: Saturday November 1 at 2pm*
Opening + book launch: Saturday November 1 following symposium, until 5pm

Monica Aasprong · Andrea Actis · James Arthur · Oana Avasilichioaei · Derek Beaulieu · Jen Bervin · Rebecca Brown · Louis Cabri · Steve Collis · Jeff Derksen · Alexandra Dipple · Sarah Dowling · Jennifer Borges Foster · Jamie Hilder · Kristin Lucas · Michael Maranda/Parasitic Ventures Press · Erin Mouré · Tom Phillips · Kristina Lee Podesva · Angela Rawlings · Mary Ruefle · Susan Schuppli · Nick Thurston · Aaron Vidaver

Erasure is much in the news these days—stock portfolio values erased, a neighbourhood buried under water by storms, candidates for office learning that the public chose someone else, or a Fortune 500 company ceasing to exist. Erasure, however, has another side that deserves to be in the news: the poetic and the critical. This is the side reflected in this 24-person international exhibition, which includes the first-ever installation of the entirety of Tom Phillips’s book A Humument.

The poets, writers, and artists in Less is More have each responded to the ironic, formal, political, and semantic possibilities that awaited liberation from the source material they elected to use. The resulting poetry can take many forms: paintings, modified books, vinyl lettering on walls and floor, or blacked-out government documents.

Erasure is the most serious way that playfulness has emerged in recent art. By modifying existing documents and artifacts in aid of reconsidering their meaning, erasures provide an intriguing model for the ways in which meaning is created in the first place; it is epistemology, with fun added.

Panel discussion, Opening, Book Launch: Saturday November 1, 2pm
Please join us for a panel discussion on “The Poetics and Politics of Erasure” with Derek Beaulieu, Clint Burnham, Kristina Lee Podesva and Nick Thurston. Panel starting at 2pm, in room AQ3003, next to SFU Gallery. Followed by reception to 5pm.
*Note that the panel discussion was originally advertised as starting at 1pm, but the time has been changed to 2pm.

Publication:
This exhibition is accompanied by a 144-page book co-published as the exhibition catalogue and as an issue of The Capilano Review.

Lunchtime talks at 12:05pm and 12:35pm on:
Wed Nov 5, Thurs Nov 6, Fri Nov 7

Talks for classes or groups may be scheduled by appointment at 778.782.4266 or gallery@sfu.ca.

FREE PARKING! November 1 only. The exhibition card, media release, or Erasure exhibition page from our website is your visitor parking pass in any Visitor Lot at SFU (face up on dashboard or hand to parking attendant).

Contact and information:
The SFU Gallery is located at the SFU Burnaby Campus, AQ3004 (in the Academic Quadrangle, south side); Hours: Tues-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 12pm-5pm. We are closed for holiday long weekends.

Elsinore Library at Shandy Hall

Tom Phillips installation work The Library at Elsinore, will be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Shandy Hall Gallery this autumn. Amongst the exhibits are six new pages from A Humument completed especially for this exhibition. The show will run from 22nd September to 30th November and all readers are invited to the private view to meet the artist on Sunday 21st September between 11am and 3pm. A special Elsinore Library blog has been created as a resource for schools who will be working on projects associated with the exhibition.
Shandy Hall Gallery
Laurence Sterne Trust
Shandy Hall
Coxswold
York YO61 4AD

Cardinal Newman

On Wednesday September 10 there will be a formal unveiling and dedication of a new mosaic by Tom Phillips of John Henry Cardinal Newman at Westminster Cathedral. The dedication will take place after the 5.30pm Mass to which all are welcome.
Illustrated here is a study for the mosaic.

Heart of Darkness

The first UK performance of Heart of Darkness will take place on August 8th 2008 to an invited audience at the ROH2 Linbury Theatre. This is a piano version of the new chamber opera composed by Tarik O'Regan to a libretto by Tom Phillips based on Joseph Conrad's novella. The workshop is part of the OperaGenesis programme which sets out to identify and develop new opera composing and writing talent from around the world and give it an international platform.
To request tickets for this performance please apply to charlotte.penton-smith@roh.org.uk
For more information about OperaGenesis follow this link.

Certain Trees

Whilst the V&A's Blood on Paper exhibition continues downstairs (until 29th June) a second exhibition, in Room 74 is strongly recommended by Tom Phillips. Certain Trees: the Constructed Book, Poem and Object from 1964 to 2008 surveys an energetic community of poets and artists in Britain discovering and developing the expressive potential of publication as an art practice.
And, while you are there, in a display cabinet close by to the exhibition you can see Tom Phillips's celestial and terrestrial Humument Globes
Certain Trees opened on the 1st April and runs until 17th August 2008. Admission is free. For more information please follow this V&A link.

Heart of Darkness reviewed in The Walrus Magazine

As readers of these pages will know, last November American Opera Projects in Brooklyn hosted the second workshop performance of Heart Of Darkness. This is a new chamber opera composed by Tarik O'Regan to a libretto by Tom Phillips and based on Joseph Conrad's novella of the same name. Read an account of the evening by Siobhan Roberts at The Walrus Magazine online.