Christopher Pearson, a MA Graduate in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, is an East London-based contemporary artist working between printmaking and sculpture. His work covers techniques including monoprint, collagraph, carborundum, viscosity, etching, and chine-collé, with a concept that concerns alchemy and transformation, time and rhythm, materiality and performativity, and the relationship between surface and substrate. He enjoys combining printmaking processes to create what he calls ‘hybrid’ prints, enabling him to discover entirely new print languages.
“What I enjoy most about printmaking is staging conditions in which a hidden performance happens between paper and plate, later revealed by the liquid colour of the ink which has been trapped between these substrates as it is rolled through the press.”
Always keen to experiment and learn new techniques, Christopher attends East London Printmakers where he works with various printmaking techniques. Here, he favours their American-French Tool Press for creating collagraphs, carborundums, and other highly textured and large-scale printmaking, and for more straightforward etching, on a smaller scale, he opts for their Rochat etching press.
Christopher looks to many printmakers for Inspiration, including Cy Twombly’s etchings, Gillian Ayres’ woodcuts, Kate Gibb’s screen prints, Howard Hodgkin’s carborundum works, and Lee Krasner’s paintings.
Recently, Christopher has been working on an edition entitled Extracts. The etched aluminium and collagraph plate from which this is printed repurposes textural offcuts from old prints and embossings. The plate is then treated with different intaglio and relief inkings, and is printed. He comments; “I enjoy this sense of regeneration, whereby something rejected is sublimated into something new and exciting. The result is always unpredictable – addictively so – and leads to further ideas and possibilities.”
Christopher has also recently partaken in a number of exhibitions, including Last Sunset / New Sunrise at St. John on Bethnal Green Church, featuring work by the Alter Us artist collective of which he is a member. Alter Us is a collective of artists, largely based in London, who, together, address and explore notions of the age of the Anthropocene, capitalism, sustainability, (dis)connection, social challenges, nature vs. technology, and the very process of questioning. The exhibition was curated by Christopher along with his friend and fellow artist Tere Chad. Last Sunset / New Sunrise presented the work of sixteen artists, created in response to one of the most pressing questions of the collective’s manifesto: ‘Are we moving towards the last sunset or a new sunrise?’ (The manifesto was written a year before COVID-19, and was declared through a collaborative performance event at The Old Baths in Hackney Wick).
“We found the metaphorical question of whether we are moving towards the last sunset or the new sunrise especially pertinent, as it encapsulates succinctly our existence amidst ecological, environmental, and political crises, recontextualised by the coronavirus pandemic,” says Christopher. All of the works were created from lockdown one onwards, and reflected each artist’s thoughts on this question, whilst exploring the complexities of our species’ survival.
The two carborundum prints (Looking at Space and Looking at Space II) that Christopher exhibited as part of the show are explorations of the qualities and politics of different types of space in the context of lockdown. Based on a view of the night-sky above Christopher’s home during lockdown one, they show a vast expanse of space above the roof and windows which frame the seclusion of suburban domesticity. He states; “They are informed by my thinking on how different types of space can represent our adaptations to new ways of life, as well as the tensions that arise within the simultaneity of being both home-bound individuals and constituents of broader communities for which we are all responsible. They also arose from my thinking on the importance of the small everyday decisions we make at home and their resounding cumulative impact on global problems.”
You can catch Christopher at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair from 11th – 14th Nov 2021 and at the Festival of Print in Mile End park. He is currently helping with the organisation, curation, and installation of this exhibition as part of a team representatives from East London Printmakers. It will feature roughly ninety artists; approximately 80 from East London Printmakers and 10 from Action Space. All are welcome to visit The Art Pavilion from Thursday 25th Nov to Sunday 5th Dec.
@christopher.pearson.art
www.christopherpearson.co.uk
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