About / Interviews and essays /
Modular Locus
In conversation with Freeny Yianni
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A solo show at The Brewhouse Gallery, Taunton. Curated by Freeny Yianni and CLOSE Ltd, in association with The Brewhouse.
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March 2020
Chuck Elliott has selected a little over twenty works to be exhibited at the Brewhouse Gallery in Taunton, in conjunction with the launch of his new book 12. The selection encompasses many of the more intriguing works to come out of his studio over the past twelve years.
Initially based in London’s Soho, Chuck moved his studio to Bristol in 2005 and has been working full time on his sublime studies in liquid geometry ever since. He enjoys a reputation as one of the UK’s foremost digital printmakers and has exhibited works in over 200 shows and events both in the UK and internationally.
Chuck Elliott produces works that hover between traditional printmaking, contemporary abstract photography, and the digital realm. Using the latest systems based drawing tools, he draws, sculpts, and refines works that are concerned with the most fundamental building blocks available to the artist; colour, line, form, and light.
Eschewing direct representation in favour of a more poetic approach, pieces are drawn from scratch, initially by hand, and later on screen, before being returned to the material world as large format laser exposed C-type photographic prints. More recently he has also been experimenting with inked editions on paper, which offer an interesting counterpoint to the darkroom techniques involved in camera-less photographic printmaking.
Works vary from fairly minimal studies to more complex sculptural drawings, taking inspiration from music, architecture, design and nature as the basis for explorations into line, colour and form. Clearly informed by the C20th works of Naum Gabo, Renzo Piano, Kandinsky, Bridget Riley or Missoni; amongst many others who have worked with colour and abstraction as key components of their practice; Chuck nevertheless maintains that his works are figured by a love of maths, and in that sense take inspiration from number systems, and the way maths defines and generates growth in the natural world all around us, and forms the basis for studies that move almost kinetically across the picture plane.
Through his work, Chuck Elliott is reinterpreting the essence of abstract fine art printmaking for the digital age.
Pure logical progression.
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In conversation with Freeny Yianni at the Brewhouse Gallery, March 2020
FY Tell us a bit about your approach to your work. How would you describe it? What are you looking for in a subject? How has your style developed, and what matters to you?
CE Sometime back in 1984 I saw, and used, the first Apple Mac computer to be imported to the UK. It was an important moment and one that resonates to this day. In that moment I decided I wanted to use digital systems tools to draw my work, as opposed to the more traditional media I was being trained to use. In some senses, you could characterise this as the difference between rock music and electronica. Rock music remains super relevant of course, esp the post-rock movement, but there seems to be space in the discourse for a more contemporary means of production too.
The digital offers a host of revolutionary options, many of which revolve around the idea of the edit, and the remix. Effectively you can draw, colour and model, and then refine, edit and remix, to arrive at images that simply weren’t possible to create before the digital revolution.
I like the idea that the work is made using contemporary tools, and I love the ability it gives me to fine-tune and nuance the images. To my mind, if art is about anything at all, and that is debatable, it should at least speak of and about its own time.
Ultimately I see the pieces as visual poems, riffing on the most basic of elements, line, colour, light and form. They’re open to individual interpretation of course, it’s said that art exists in the space between the work and the viewer and that it is, therefore, critical to leave enough space in that gap for the art to come alive. In that sense, it may be the viewer who activates the work in that moment of engagement, in their imagination, not the artists.
What matters to me is the total journey. I’m interested in the passage of time, the lived arc of the artist’s life, my life. For many years I saw this as an almost mythological construct, in part because of the way art history encourages us to view the artist as seer. But of course, that is not the case. What the artist does do, that is unusual within our society I think, is remove themselves from the mainstream world of work, and instead spend time exploring ideas around making, as a day to day practice, with all that entails.
Contemplation, critique, and relentless experimentation. This is where the work is sourced, years of focus in a potentially quite narrow furrow, that may be broken out of occasionally, travelling forward, making decisions, bending as the path progresses and new thoughts and processes manifest themselves each day. For instance just this week I was photographing macro shots of a new print work and began to wonder if the diffused images of the work distorted through the camera leas mightn’t be of more interest than the original print itself, leading to the thought that perhaps I should use the somewhat meta idea of re-photographing works at high resolution, and use the resulting photographic images as the basis for a new series of inked prints, perhaps with collage, effectively, therefore, making images of images, presented as if they were the source. It’s a thought that I’m contemplating, and will experiment with…
FY Tell us about some of the landmarks to date in your career. How and when did you find you had a talent? At what point did you start to take it seriously? And how would you like things to develop over the next few years?
CE 1984 was a big year, that was the first time I used a computer to draw a line on a screen, before that it was all gouache and pencil. I did my foundation in 1987 at Filton. 1988 was the year I enrolled at the old Hornsey School of Art in London, now amalgamated into Middlesex University sadly. 1994 was the year I opened my own studio in Soho, on Great Marlborough Street, later on moving to Clerkenwell and then Greek Street. In 2005 I moved one last time to Bristol, and am planning not to move again, I’m well settled in my studio here!
Work wise the technology keeps rolling forward. Image sizes have increased dramatically, individual C type photographic prints can now be made at 3, 4 and 5 metres. I have a 10 colour pigment printer here in the studio that can resolve a 10 metre print on a single sheet of paper. This is literally revolutionary. Laser cutting entered my practice maybe some 10 or so years ago, with a piece entitled Radial / ONE, which has led me into making pieces that are more sculptural and hold a different place on the wall by comparison to more traditionally framed pieces.
Four years ago I launched my Experimental Print Club, which is now 13 editions old, powered online by Patreon, it’s a vehicle I use for exploring the hybridity between the digital and the haptic worlds of printmaking, allowing for a point of departure from the more overtly photographic works I’ve been making. It’s also a study into the realities of showrooming and disintermediation, and the many ways in which the internet is rewiring the high street, the gallery system, and the myriad ways in which we encounter the visual both on and off screen.
This Spring I’ve published a new book entitled 12, which looks back over the best images I’ve collected from the past twelve years.
Important shows include the Bristol Contemporary Open which I co-curated in 2008, Coda at Close in 2011, Coda on Cork St with Anna Gillespie in the same year, and 3 solo shows at the Catto Gallery in London in 2012, 2015 and 2017. I currently have a new show entitled Modular Locus, my first big solo show in a public art space as opposed to privately owned galleries, at the Brewhouse Gallery in Taunton. So many more things I could list, with over 200 shows and exhibitions under my belt, looking back from this distance it’s been amazing to have had work included in so many events and to see the work accepted more widely despite its non-traditional media.
FY What techniques do you use, or have had the most success with? What great influences or heroes do you have in this sphere, and what is exciting you the most in the art world at the moment?
CE I use digital drawing tools mostly, alongside a pencil, editing both vector graphics and pixel based imagery, back and forth. There’s also a desire to jump in and out of the digital, using traditional printmaking techniques on press and in the studio, alongside high tech processes like laser cutting, and laser exposure in the darkroom. More recently I’m also using pigment printing, and incorporating photographic imagery into the drawings.
Ultimately there’s a joy to be derived from working with whatever media may grab your interest at any particular moment.
Heroes. So many to mention. A lot of my heroes come from the world of graphic art, music, architecture and design, as well as fine art, so April Greiman, Neville Brody and Vaughan Oliver would certainly be 3, as well as Alan Fletcher and Martin Lambie Nairn. Missoni, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. Donald Judd, Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, Dale Chihuly, Underworld, Fred Tomaselli, Bruce Nauman, Eduardo Chillida, Hokusai, Ben Nicholson and Radiohead of course.
The beauty of studio practice is that it gives you time to study, reflect and contemplate, in an almost monastic way. I spend most of my time in a smallish studio, drawing, reading and writing, with occasional forays into the garden for some air and exercise. In many ways this seems to me to be almost the definition of monastic life, it’s certainly an opportunity for life long learning, and increasingly I see studio practice as a kind of research environment in which new ideas can be tested, practised, and hopefully resolved. The artworks, therefore, become waymarkers, points along a path that is being defined by the journey, moments in time, sparking off along the way as we travel through time.
The big questions being asked in the studio at the moment all revolve around the climate crisis and how to respond to it, both personally and through the work. I’ve just come back from a glorious demo out on the streets with Greta Thunberg, a true hero, and am keen to work some of that thinking into new pieces. I’m not sure exactly how that will manifest, but ultimately I think it’s going to become an unavoidable issue for all of us, and it seems right therefore that my practice should evolve to encompass and consider some of the core issues surrounding sustainability over the coming decade. In the art world more widely I think we’re going to see a move towards craft and making, in which simple haptic pleasures will be valued more highly, perhaps at the expense of conceptualism, although I hope not. We’ll see…
I wrote a longer piece about these ideas entitled Tao / plastic pastoral, it’s online here
To simultaneously hold the dichotomous view of valuing production whilst eschewing consumption, entails the high wire act of believing that the production holds a benefit at least equal to the cost of the material it consumes.