Ya Zahir Ya Batin!

The Manifest. The Hidden.

Socks with sandals are back!

30 Day Lunar Love Affair (in Oils)

One painting a day Aug-Sep 09

More about me then let's move on shall we.

That's the BLISTRAP World Tour over with. Starting at the Grapes pub and finishing 2 days later in London. It went so quick we didn't even notice all those gigs in 57 amazing countries! Stefano came over for the evening (from Italy!) and played like dynamite! Pity there were no bloody cymbals on the studio drum kit, but he made a excellent meal out of the bits he'd brought. Thanks also to Paul 'Time Attendant' Swindon for contributions to an excellent 2nd set. You can download the whole 90mins here - it's good! Thanks to Paul Shearsmith for putting us up; a lovely bloke and a great mini trumpet player as well as half of The Fujii
Meanwhile back in Sheffield, I'm getting on with a painting a day for this lunar month as a concept piece (10 days to go), starting working for Bloc on their new Education Project and trying to get on with my dissertation while reading lots of great books (check out 'Free Play - Improvisation in Life and Art' by Stephen Nachmanovitch) and looking forward to a couple of trips away including a weekend of qi gong with a Chinese master and 10 days with a Sufi master in Cyprus!

BLISTRAP

'How to properly destroy a guitar'. Tremendous fun! Finally got round to the slow destruction of a crappy old acoustic guitar that's been haunting me for ages - on stage though a PA with a contact mic! Yes I forgot to document it but hey, you shoulda been there. I got this pic which captures the final end after I threw it off stage. The decent sized audience enjoyed the set too. This was toward the end of a thorough 40 mins bash headlining at the Grapes with BLISTRAP, with Mick Beck and Charlie Collins guesting for the first time on drums. I slowly started with detuning it while playing then sawing and scratching until puncturing it with the screwdriver a few times before smashing it's poor body to bits. What a lovely sound! Funnily enough I broke two strings on the electric within ten minutes, almost a pre-cursor from the frightened guitar pixies. We're on Resonance FM on Saturday night - tune in on the web here or 104.4 FM in the London area. It's Jonny Mugwump's excellent show 'Exotic Pylon'. Stefano is coming over from Venice especially for just this show - so tune in! Oh yeah two new albums out - watch this space!!!!!!! etc..

New work...

Getting a pretty good flow of ideas this Summer but a lot of energy is going into planning for Enable (new blog here) and my dissertation as well as an application to the SSE for a year long course alongside the final year of my degree. On top of that I've also been given some work at Bloc organising their pilot educational project. So, art output currently includes a submission to Pan-demonium, quite a lot of fine line doodles and a 30cm sq painting a day for 29.53 days (the lunar month of Ramadan) (8 so far). I've also done a few sketches and got ideas for what I'm calling 'automatic mind maps', I'd like to do a large one as a performance piece somewhere. I'm also considering the impressions one gets from thousands of charaters in one space - the 'one in the many' effect, which I used to find overpowering especially on busy shopping streets. Recently I've found it incredibly intriguing and I wonder about interacting with this phenomenon in different ways as well as removing a number of people to an entirely different location to see what happened to their characters which seem to be enlarged when they are in the busy shoppatropolis. Sound wise a couple of gigs with BLISTRAP (inc. ResonanceFM live set on 5 Sep) coming up as well as organising for an electronics improv night on Sep 26 at Bloc, I think that's it.

A piece in a New York based exhibition

Pan-demonium resonates with the current global political, ecological and economic situation - one in which the hegemonic forces of order have been overwhelmed by a dynamic of chaos and disorder, turning the world 'upside-down'. Does it offer a metaphor for a critique of global capitalism and its 'devils' - its pan-demons - in all their guises (pan-demics included)? Or perhaps it conjures up collective creative forces for political challenge and the re-inscription of Pan in contemporary mythology?

bricolagekitchen invited visual, sonic and written responses to the idea of Pan-demonium and brought this together in an exhibition presented at AC Institute [Direct Chapel] New York 3 September 10 October 2009. The exhibition, documented and explored in this publication, assembled a cacophony of over fifty contemporary artistic responses and global voices gleaned via the web in a panorama of sound, text, visual and moving imagery, celebrating the affective power of disorder and noise. So, what does Pan-demonium mean to you?

AC Institute [Direct Chapel]
547 W 27th St 5th Floor New York NY 10001
www.artcurrents.org bricolagekitchen
aka Gillian Whiteley

Update

Just scraped through 2nd yr, pleased considering extremely tricky subject matter for essay ('Can Art Be Taught') as well as some strenuous circumstances. Out of the trees now though and getting down to some real creating and planning. Completed first workshop for kids at Bloc and started entering some exhibitions including Pan-demonium (NY) and Leeds Open as well as looking at ideas for a 2 week placement. The Montessori School are interested and have asked me to write further, (also see Pyrites for some really interesting alternative education philosophy) the Cyprus College of Art sounds like a nice one for a standard month's residency, seeing as I'm heading that way anyway soon. One other idea is spending time with a clinical psychologist researching synaesthesia which ties in nicely with Freenoise and so back to the live paintings on stage and waiting to hear from a couple of researchers.

The Sea In Legend & Tradition: Call for Papers

This two-day conference at the Time & Tide, the maritime museum at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, will be held on Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th September 2009 as the fourth Legendary Weekend of the Folklore Society.

We'd like to hear from anyone who can attend and present a paper - folklorists, performers, historians, singers and cultural or local historians. Come and celebrate mermaids, scrimshaw, ghost ships, shanties, shape-shifting seals, omens, lost lands and lucky beach-combings. Presentations, which should be 20 minutes long, can take the form of talks, performances, or DVD. There will be a limited number of opportunities for art installations. The main event will take place on Saturday with additional material and site visits on Sunday.

If you would like to attend or to present a paper or performance, please contact:

Jeremy Harte, Bourne Hall, Spring Street, Ewell, Surrey KT17 1UF
Tel. 44 (0) 208 394 1734 Email: JHarte@epsom-ewell.gov.uk

Tuning Forks - first workshop @ Bloc 28.6.09

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A42D Drawing Exhibition at Bloc

Bloc's current exhibition is drawing on A4 paper by studio holders and past exhibitors, under a loose theme around the financial recession. It's a fascinating range of work and the simplicity of the traditional format and ethos is appealing. I'm very happy to have a piece of work alongside established and new talented artists, which I called 'Index' with eighty lines drawn with a found marker pen almost blacking out the paper representing potential further drawings. We had a very busy opening last night but today is almost dead, perhaps the hot sun is drawing people to the fields and gardens. The exhibition continues until Sat 27th June and all the works are for sale by 'silent auction' with a reserve price of £20.
www.blocprojects.co.uk

Introducing the future Octave Doctors...

News of our first tentative workshop at Bloc Space. It will be very informal and more like a fun get together but we should have a couple of games and exercises as well as loads of musical instruments to play with.

TUNING FORKS. Percussion and Music Workshops.
(provisional informal meeting #1)
Sun 28th June. 11am - 1pm. Bloc Gallery. 71 Eyre Lane Sheffield. S1 4RB

An opportunity for children ages 5 - 12 to mix and interact with other children while playing with a broad range of musical and percussion instruments (and bring their own) in a relaxed, informal setting.
The two hour session will be fully supervised and will consist of some loosely structured games and exercises based around rhythm and song as well as free time to explore the equipment and make as much noise as possible.
Emphasis is on fun while stimulating creative learning. The gallery is 6m square and there is a small yard we can use.
Refreshments provided. Bring your own earplugs.
Booking advised by return email / phone. Maximum 12 children.
info@freenoise.co.uk
tel: 07754 910156

Amazing virtuoso Mick Beck has agreed to pop down with his bassoon for a free impromptu gig and demonstration for us all!
This is the first experimental session and hopefully launch a broad programme of developing creative workshops for children, adults and other groups.
No charge for this first workshop.
For safety, no cars will be allowed through the Eyre Lane gate between 11am and 1pm, thank you.
Jonny Drury is an experimental musician and artist currently based in Bloc Studios. He established the improvised music concert series Freenoise in 2004, organising well over 50 successful concerts at numerous venues in the Sheffield area. He has facilitated art workshops for children and adults, is a parent, currently working towards his MArt Contemporary Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam. He will be joined by Katie Owens, an artist, musician and one of the directors of Bloc Projects.

Threee great gigs starting this Saturday!

Freenoise got off to a great start this season with White, BLISTRAP and Hunter Gracchus at the Shakespeare last week. Brilliant to see our old school regulars and loads of new faces! Great room and an excellent pub too. Here's what's coming up at OTT in collaboration with the superb outfit Notes and Sounds who've been putting on alternative gigs in Sheffield for nearly 35 years!!
Check out the main Freenoise site for all the latest news and reviews.

New studio / address

Really happy to have a new studio at long last. This is the first time I've had a studio outside of my house or uni since 1995. Bloc is a really great place to be and I really thought it would be nice to be there before I even thought it would be realistic. Lovely big, light room shared with two other artists. This Sat and Sun we'll have a few paintings and drawings up as part of the Open Up art festival which is taking place all over Sheffield. It continues the following weekend too. We'll be soon organising some great music, art and other events in the gallery.
Come down and see the Bloc complex including gallery, courtyard, open studios and the other artists displaying and selling original work! Have a drink and bring some sunshine and smiles! Be great to see you there!

Jonny Drury / Freenoise
Studio 26
Bloc Studios
198 Arundel Street
Sheffield
S1 4RE
tel: 07754 910156
BLOC PROJECTS

Kelvin Records Launch organised by Freenoise at Bloc Gallery 17th April 2009. Pictured: Martin Archer/Film by J Drury #

Public contemporary art show.

My piece in our Yr2 Contemporary Fine Art Group Show - in an empty shop on The Moor, Sheffield. More pics here. I took voyeuristic close-up on faces video of people walking down the street outside the venue. The intriguing, often apparently miserable features of many a shopper echoed the current economic recession. The faces were captured and frames blown up and overlaid with my notes, posters placed around an existing hole in the wall of the empty shop (being known as 'slack space') in a rosette style. Inside the hole the rules around printing banknotes. A pile of fake banknotes on the floor (adhering to said rules) in a shape which mirrored said hole. Interesting responding to the space but a pretty heartless and shallow exercise really, in order to fulfill this part of the course requirement. I made a short compilation video of the said shoppers' faces which I might make public.