Art after Nature: Days of Future Past

6th May to 21st May 2019 

An exhibition by Current MA Fine Art Students at Birmingham City University to celebrate the bicentenary of John Ruskin's birth.

The work I presented for the exhibition was a large scale woodcut printing block made from three pieces of 15mm thick birch panels.

The pieces are cut in the shape of a Gothic arch and hinged together using brass piano hinges to form a triptych.

The work was exhibited in the Concourse at the School of Art, Margaret Street, Birmingham and was entitled:

The Head, the Hand and the Heart

Image showing the triptych in its closed position









Image showing the triptych with the side "wings" almost fully open













Detail with the robot building a wall

Detail of a robot woman washing up

Detail of a robot in the office

John Ruskin, (1819-1900), was supported financially all his life by his father and could easily have chosen to live a life of idleness and luxury. Instead he devoted his time and energy to studying nature and to teaching us how to care for our world. He told us: "It is the job and the joy of mankind to look after the earth."

In his journal  Fors Clavigera, he forecast with disapproval the coming of, "machinery that will build, plough, thresh . . .  meantime your wife in the house has also got a goblin to weave and wash for her, and she is lying on the sofa reading poetry."

The artwork is my interpretation of what I imagine these goblins or robots of the future might resemble.

Ruskin was opposed to any form of mechanization of labour and tried to teach us the importance of useful and creative employment, and that idleness does not bring well-being and happiness. In very recent times medical research has found strong evidence that creativity has a major positive impact on both mental and physical health.

Ruskin was a champion of the Gothic style of architecture and believed that the stunning features in some of the Gothic buildings that he studied in Venice and elsewhere, were copied direct from nature, and were the result of the freedom given to the masons and carvers to be creative in their work. It would be quite interesting know what his views on on the modern tower blocks as shown in my artwork might have been! 

The centre piece in the triptych is inspired by Edvard Munch's The Scream.