Part of the 2019 Deptford X festival
Founded in 1998, Deptford X is London’s longest-running visual arts festival. In 2019, the theme of the festival was Stop Making Sense, in reference to the live album and, groundbreaking, filmed live concert by Talking Heads. This project started as an exercise in automatic drawing, responding to music to create abstract images. With no intention of a final image, the exercise was a form of meditation, an attempt to engage the parasympathetic side of the the autonomic nervous system. As the exercises began to develop into a project I engaged with music that reflected my own interests over the years, to see if I could discern a theme or some historical narrative, proposing the conjecture that the development of electronic music had a direct bearing on the entropy of genre led music.
The series of images below, entitled, ‘Transformers’, are responses to five unique collaborations from the early Seventies to the turn of the century that changed the paradigm of music. The accompanying essay; Facts Continue to Change Their Shape, explores some of the history around the records and the artists involved.
1) Roxy Music; Roxy Music (1972)
2) Talking Heads; Stop Making Sense (1984)
3) Paul Simon; Graceland (1986)
4) Happy Mondays; Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches (1990)
5) Gorillaz; Gorillaz (2000)
