group | matter
JNPrints
James works with photography, print and printed matter to create books, prints and multiples.
His work begins with photography, usually of found surfaces and objects where the focus is on non-deliberate mark making and processes that create a visual effect without aesthetic consideration. Unconscious traces of previous activity.
The subject is the seen and the unseen, the visible and the ‘invisible’, what we (choose to) see and how it is presented to us. By reframing and re-presenting the results of these processes through print the focus of our attention is drawn to the beauty of the accidental and things just as they are.
Previously one half of Highchair Editions.
JN001 → undoing
These photographs were taken on the first three days of a ten day summer retreat at Vajrasana, a retreat centre in Suffolk purpose built for The London Buddhist Centre by Walters & Cohen Architects.
Soon after loading the third roll of film I came to realise that I should not be taking photographs, the point of the retreat was not to ‘do’ anything. For me photography could also be construed as ‘work’ - the one thing that we had been asked not to bring with us - and I also realised that it was a form of self- protection, a hiding place, I was safe behind my camera.
So I stopped & the retreat started............
(Experimental printing on the risograph, using combinations of layouts, juxtapositions and overlays of 33 photographs, making each copy slightly different.)
28 x 20cm
100 pages approx
Risograph on Canon Yellow label 80gsm
Screenprinted cover on recycled card 500mic
Published 2024
Edition of 20
£20
JN002 → untitled 1-16
Found surfaces photographed in close up and represented as pure abstract imagery, these urban fragments are traces of human activity which ofter go unseen or ignored as visual noise. Seen in detail as they really are reveals their textural and gestural beauty, all the more so because of they are non-industrial, non-designed and unrationalised. Taking influence from Antoni Tapies whose ‘political and rebellious attitude sought to give value to materials, objects and images traditionally despised by society.’
32 x 23cm
16 pages
16 Photographs
Xerox Laser on Real Silver Perigrina 120gsm
Colorplan 135gsm cover with screenprinted text
Published 2023
Edition of 50
Published by Highchair Editions
£25
JN003 → Views
A series of photographs of windows in museums and galleries across Europe where blinds are installed to reduce daylight levels and prevent UV light from damaging the artworks. Works are usually hung chronologically and labelled to explain their origins and place in the lineage of art history. Works are removed from the present (and our immediate experience of them) and placed in the past as historical artefacts.
Based on the idea that the views we hold and carry around with us become what we see.
30 x 21cm
60 pages
30 Photographs
Risograph on Evercopy 80gsm
Published 2023
Edition of 50
Published by Highchair Editions
£18
JN004 → light
Any discussion of architecture by Mies van der Rohe quickly turns to materials. Steel, glass, marble, stone - clean lines and hard edges are used to create purity of concept and image.
The Neue National Gallery in Berlin (1963 - 1968) is perhaps the ultimate example of Mies’ quest for his concept of “universal space”. As architecture it has become iconic, as a space for showing art it is at best problematic - form before function? Mies himself states, “It is such a huge hall that of course it means great difficulties for the exhibiting of art. I am fully aware of that. But it has so much potential that I simply cannot take those difficulties into account.”
During a recent refurbishment by David Chipperfield Architects (2012 - 2021) some of its deeper faults were exposed once the surface layers were removed, as Chipperfield describes “it was as if the surface was holding everything together.” For an architect who espoused truth to materials some of those surfaces were paper thin.
Upon completion it was realised that in order for the space to function as a gallery some form of diffusion would be required to protect works of art from sunlight coming through the full height glass walls. This was one compromise that Mies was persuaded to accept but only on the proviso that “it must under no circumstances impair the structural clarity and must be an independent addition to the building.”
Hence the curtain, the only soft material in the space, is introduced as a diaphanous mesh around the perimeter. Rarely included in official photographs for fear of diluting the image, the curtain responds to the most fundamental architectural element of all - light. The curtain catches the light whilst all the other materials around it reflect. As a material it is organic, ephemeral, translucent, insubstantial; and yet it practically holds the building up by enabling it to function as an art gallery.
29 x 21.5cm
12 pages
6 Photographs
Laser print on tracing paper 41gsm
Housed in glassine bag with text sheet
Published 2024
£20