The EP I wrote and recorded with local musicians in Pensacola, Florida, whilst artist in residence at The 309 Punk Project, is out on all major streaming platforms now!
Search ‘smarkgubb’ or ‘Pwnc: O Dywysog i Reslwr Croeswisgo’ to find it. And here’s a link to the EP on Spotify.
Please enjoy and share!
I’ve recently spent a month in Pensacola with The 309 Punk Project as artist in residence and will post a full account in time, when I really get my head around how incredible the experience was.
In the meantime, they’ve recently posted this interview I did with them back in Covid-times, and there’s a lot in here that prefaces what I’ve gone on to do with the organisation this summer, so I thought I’d share it.
It’s been quite a start to 2024. In the second week of the month I was involved in an amazing week of R&D with Common Wealth in Cardiff (more to follow), then immediately got side-swiped by illness that mutated into bronchitis and laid me low for the rest of the month.
That said, it’s been a strangely productive month as my typing fingers were still working, even if my lungs weren’t, so I’ve managed to move a lot of things along, on paper, that have needed a bit of a shove for a while.
The month started with the announcement from the 309 Punk Project in Pensacola that I’ve been invited to be their July ‘24 artist in residence - the first international resident in their programme that’s been running for the past three years. I’m really excited by this, as they’re an inspiring bunch of people, who I had the pleasure to meet back in 2018 when we were presenting together at a conference in Los Angeles. The 309 is a thing of beauty - an old punk house in the city now transformed into a living archive and project space celebrating the city’s punk scene. To say it’s up my street is something of an understatement. Do check them out. (Needless to say, I’ll be even more excited if the funding application I’ve put in to go and do the residency is successful…)
As mentioned in the first paragraph, I was part of a week-long R&D in early January with an amazing group of people, brought together by Common Wealth, for a National Theatre Wales-funded R&D week, to test the potential for a performance based on under-cover policing, specifically from the point of view of activists and groups who were infiltrated.
It’s a fascinating subject. The two main advisors we had with us for the week were the two hosts of the Spycops.Info podcast (I’ll not name them - not because they’re in-hiding or anything, but out of respect for the fact that their lives were turned upside down by undercover surveillance and the abuse of power that came with that). Their stories are equal-parts fascinating, inspiring, scary, and enraging. And if you’re wondering whether the Police were just doing what needs to be done to keep society safe, the activists successfully sued them and the investigation is ongoing.
The week was spent in the Royal Oak pub in Cardiff (which is an amazing, proper, old, pub on Newport Rd), with them, and a group of musicians, performers, and writers, to begin imagining what this performance might look like. Photographer Jon Poutney dropped in a few times to document things and these are selection of the wonderful pictures he took (all copyright, his).
My role is as the designer of the whole thing, so I was primarily observing, taking pictures, playing with lights and smoke, and things like that. I’ve put a zine together to capture something of the essence of the week and to begin that process of visual translation. You can see it here:
As well as that, I’ve started work on a new project over in Weston-super-Mare with RCKa architects, which is a redevelopment of the old Tropicana Lido - the site for Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’ and, more recently, ‘SEE MONSTER’.
Over the next two years the site is being redeveloped to become a multi-use space, most significantly with the capacity to hold large, open air, gigs. My role on the project is to develop and deliver the artistic outreach programme and to design a major new sculptural element to be incorporated into the redevelopment. With a history of the site including sculptural elements like those in the pics below, there’s plenty to play with. So watch this space…
Last, but by no means least, I’ve been working on a project for a few years now, trying to bring a photographic archive - taken by Pop Artist, Derek Boshier, when he lived in Wales in the 70s - back to Wales. For any of you that saw the show of Derek’s work I curated at Mostyn back in 2019, you’ll have had a taste of the archive - an extraordinary glimpse of Welsh rural life in the 1970s through the lens of one the UKs original Pop Artists. Part of the issue is the geographical distance between us (me in Cardiff, Derek in L.A.) and the fact that these photographs were taken half a century ago, so locating them and any negatives amongst a studio-archive as big as Derek’s is a bit of needle-in-a-haystack situation.
Anyway, this morning I woke up to these photos from my friend, Jonathan Griffin, who has kindly taken up the task of helping to find this stuff…
(Bronchitis aside…) it looks like 2024 is shaping up pretty well.
Earlier this year I was part of an amazing project ‘The State We’re In’ by The Gallery/Artichoke (see last blog post). I’m very happy to say that alongside the launch of Season 3 of this project, in September, there’s goign to be an exhibition of the artworks from Season 1+2 at the Truman Brewery, in London.
From the press release…
“Join us at a special, free-to-visit retrospective exhibition at Truman Brewery, London, for 1-week only to mark the launch of The Gallery, Season 3.
Featuring artworks from Seasons 1 – 3, the retrospective exhibition will showcase The Gallery’s collective power to comment on the some of the most important issues of our time. It’ll be a unique chance to see all of the powerful works exhibited together for the very first time!
The upcoming Season of The Gallery, launching 4 September, presents 11 timely works in response to the question, No But Where Are You Really From?. This season, the artists share complex, confronting and creative interpretations of identity, origin, heritage, belonging, and what it means to be ‘from somewhere’.
The Gallery is a new kind of cultural institution, without walls – bringing thought-provoking art to everyone on thousands of sites normally reserved for advertising, from bus stops screens to billboards.
Dates: 2 - 9 September
Times: 10:00 - 18:00
Location: Dray Walk, Truman Brewery, E1 6QL
Price: FREE, no ticket required
Find out more: https://thegallery.org.uk/ “
It’s a good day today. I’m off to London for the launch of ‘The State We’re In’ - a new season of digital and print billboard works commissioned by The Gallery and Artichoke.
From the website…
“11 timely and powerful artworks respond to the theme ‘The State We’re In’ on thousands of billboards and outdoor digital screens across the four nations of the UK.. The exhibition ’The State We’re In’ is open in towns and cities, large and small, across our four nations, freely available to millions of people for 4 weeks: from London to Glasgow to Manchester, Southampton and Cardiff. Look out for the artworks on high-streets, bus stops, cinemas and billboards near you!”
I’m genuinely excited by this. The organisation have been great to work with, the project and its content couldn’t be more timely, and making work for the public realm in this way is always fun, rewarding, and unknown. 11 artists have been commissioned for this season of the project and you can see/read about all of them and their work HERE.
In terms of my own work, this is it…
…and as far as my thinking goes, the statement I wrote for the project website says it all…
“Our society and culture increasingly values economic profit and personal advancement above all else; an individualistic and capitalist-driven world-view, that can only lead to division and catastrophe. It is no-longer conjecture that businesses conspire to make profit from activities long-since known to be toxic to the world. ‘Profit and self above all else’, on one level, acts as a critical observation of this problem. It could also be taken as a mantra for the American Psycho generation, reading as something of an objectivist tenet. We live in a time of real-life Bond villains; super-rich, super-powerful, individuals, living on private islands with enough personal wealth to end all the world’s inequalities, but waking up every day and choosing not to. If that’s not a contemporary equivalent of holding the world to ransom, I’m unsure what is.”
If you see any of the billboards on your travels, please do snap a picture and send it to me as these are going to be on hundreds of sites across the UK, so I won’t even see a fraction of them.
