Peter Williams - Terrestrial Locomotion - The Final Guest artist at The Print Shop.

Peter Williams, based in Cardiff is the Co-founder and studio director for The Print Market Project.

http://www.printmarketproject.com

On display from the 6^th November until the 29^th November

Pete will be transforming the entire feature wall at The Print Shop into one giant woodcut as he displays a huge block from his epic body of work Terrestrial Locomotion.

As the title suggests the work began its journey as a movement across country. Carrying a tiny sketchbook and a pencil Pete would begin by setting his running watch to zero, choosing a direction and then running in that direction until he couldn’t run any longer. Whatever appeared in front of him at this point would then be the subject of his initial drawing.

The Wood block we are lucky enough to be showing at The Print Shop in Bristol depicts what is left of the LLywernog Silver mine, in the title is also the Distance, 6.38m, the step count 8594 steps and the time 54minutes 18 seconds. This numerical figure serves to the picture a kind of map reference to where the subject stands, from the point in which the artist began his run. The circular shape signifies to Pete a kind of medallion for each run in the series of works.

About the work he says that ‘so many artists spend forever deciding what to create a piece of work about and at the end of the day it could as well be anything’. This method of letting chance and stamina find the subject presents a new way of looking at the artist’s context for which they base their work.  Routed in landscape the work has a physical context not only in how the subject was chosen but also it’s method.

From a drawing about 3inches square Pete reworks the image onto a block 8ft square and then uses chisels, wire brushes, power saws and gouges to expressively recreate the image into marine ply exploiting the directions in the layers of grain and the physicality of the entire process.

It’s great to have this opportunity to show a monumental piece, where the block itself is the art and one which reflects the very essence of print, the transferal of an image from one surface to another.

LLywernog Sliver Mine

6.38m 8594s 54.18

Woodcut Block Black ink on Ply

8ft x 8ft 

2012

For More information about this work there’s a great video interview with Pete at the following link .

http://www.culturecolony.com/search?s=pete+williams&view=videos

Written By JJ Lynch.