I was very happy to be asked to take part in an evening of talks put on by Glasgow School of Art as part of their degree show, which this year travelled down to London. The event took place at Shoreditch town hall, speakers included present and recent graduates from the Visual Communication course, and some from longer ago (like me)! as well as friends of the course, including stand up comedian Josie Long. It was a varied and entertaining evening with lots of great work on show. I had not come across the format before - Pecha Kucha works as a series of 20 slides, with only 20 seconds for each slide. It was quite an art to get the timings right and get your points across in a concise way and it all seemed to be over very quickly! (in 6 mins 40 secs to be exact...)
The way I tackled it was to choose one piece of work from every year of my artistic career so far. This meant the journey back in time started 20 years ago in 1994 on my A level course! It was a very interesting exercise to look back and see how my work has developed over the years. Here are a few of the images, in date order...
First up is a piece from 1st year A levels. I loved painting then, worked very big, loved Magritte and odd combinations of things... Then we have some playful reinterpretations of tube station names - for 'Seven sisters' my sister Jo dressed up in seven very different outfits! After that, spreads from my children's book 'The Queen's Day off' done whilst at GSA, the crossword from my envelopes project, and an early commission for a pixi book for Carlsen 'Die Elefant und der Maus'. Moving on to MA work for nonsense alphabet 'A is for Rhinoceros' and then a couple of early book covers, including my first, for Penguin. More recent work includes the cover for 'The Silver spoon for children' and 'Key penguin' from my stationery project with Noodoll.
