- Venue
- Howard Gardens Gallery
- Location
- Wales
The two highlights of Peter Ford’s recent exhibition in Cardiff of works on paper were the large paper collages mounted on wooden panels, dominating opposite sides of Howard Gardens Gallery at UWIC (University Institute of Wales in Cardiff). Head in the Clouds and All at Sea was designed with the specific dimensions of the gallery in mind, and offered a panoramic window onto the thought processes of the artist.
The panels that made up the piece consisted of sections of textured hand-made paper, ranging in colours from black to earth brown at the edges to sky blue across the centre. A network of embossed lines – roads, branches, roots or the arteries of a river – connected the two edges of the piece. The work contained both a sense of expansiveness and a longing for rooted-ness, a distillation perhaps of Ford’s experiences of travel overseas in order to exhibit his own work and find artists for his gallery in Bristol. During its making, he also had in mind his frequent long-haul journeys to visit family in Canada and the gradual intrusions into the landscape of human activity and construction seen from the aeroplane. In its construction, the work recalled a Japanese screen while the embossed patterns and colours resembled an aerial view of a watery seascape between continents, providing a subtle gradation of colours and tone. The textured paper seemed to yield beautifully to the processes of colouring and embossing.
In Street Language – Things Fall Apart, a substantial relief print on handmade paper, the artist used this embossing technique again to great effect, employing the thickness and softness of handmade paper as a mould to carry the imprint shapes of a variety of metal found objects which were displayed in a glass case beneath the print, an artwork in their own right, I think. There was something dynamic about the way the items were arranged. Objects and words seemed to interact with each other. It was both industrial and archaeological, and exposed the artist’s curiosity about and explorations of his immediate environment. The reddish-browns were produced from Bristol earth. The items were collected from various parts the world, but could have been exhumed from the muddy bed of the Avon.
While these larger pieces were expressive of things in transit or in motion, and Line Dance IV & I and Electric Field XVIII & XIX buzz with an elemental energy, many of the works on display had a kind of leaden heaviness or, otherwise, a monochrome darkness which felt rather oppressive. The texture of the paper itself convincingly recalled the weight and roughness of stone. Arch was constructed from layers of interleaved paper sheets resembling roof slates; in Signs of Life VI and XI Ford produced his own fossils in paper form; and, in Cipher and Borderlines, he recreated lunar-like surfaces. Ballroom Blue to Porphyry Pink, a pastel and relief printed etching constructed from collaged squares of subtle pastel pink, terracotta and blue, and etched with fan-like shapes, provided some light relief.
Asian influences made frequent appearances, such as in the tie-dye series on Korean paper, Itajime, simply pinned on the gallery wall, and in Check Book, constructed from linocuts and woodcuts on Japanese paper.
Ford previously organised Made in Japan, an exhibition of contemporary artwork on and with paper in collaboration with Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, and has also liaised with artists from Poland, Hungary, Russia, the USA and Japan over the past two decades to organise UK touring exhibitions of their work, via his gallery Off-centre. The exhibition at Howard Gardens included a section with work from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Japan and India. It was traditional in tone, the artists using tried and tested printing techniques such as woodcut, mezzotint, dry-point and photogravure. If it was difficult to get a real sense of the work of each artist – most of them being represented only by one or two works – and if their inclusion provided only a glimpse of their practice, perhaps it may be explained by the fact that the works in the exhibition were pulled together by Peter and Christine Ford partly to fill a gap in the gallery’s calendar using work already to hand.
Ford’s section provided a worthwhile insight into the variety and experimental nature of his printmaking and decades of influences and experiences that have informed it. Viewing Head in the Clouds and All at Sea installed in the gallery for which it was produced, in particular, made it an interesting visit to Cardiff.