Simon Callery

Simon Callery talks about his current painting in relation to the Thames Gateway Project – a research fellowship he is currently working on. These painting constitute a response to a landscape that is the subject of a major regeneration scheme. The work is informed by time spent on excavation sites with Oxford Archaeology in the Thames Gateway region.“The paintings are characterized by an ambition to confront landscape as a material and temporal environment. My experience of this landscape calls for a multi-sensory response challenging the entrenched traditions of landscape-based art that place an emphasis on the visual - the domain of the eye - above all else. The dynamic of change taking place across this landscape has acted as a spur to develop new forms for painting to represent the experience of contemporary landscape.”

- Studied for a BA in Fine Art from Cardiff Uni, then travelled around the States and the Middle East for five years

- Callery thinks it is the painter's duty to create an experience and that artwork is the output of formalised/ academic research

- Every project informs the next- organic process

- Work is often large in scale as he likes to create a link to architectural grammar, as well as painting

- Does not like to paint pictures, as he does not feel the need to represent the world or establish an art language, instead he often paints the canvas lead white, then strips the surface, so to remove any trace of the canvas

- The size and surface of these luminous white works helps the viewer to become aware of himself

- Callery also creates canvases that lack rigidity. By creating a bulge on one of the vertical sides, similar to the slight curve in a Greek column, the artist believes a relationship is more easily formed between the person and work

- Callery attended a six week dig of an Iron Age hill fort in Oxford, as he wanted to reassess his interest in landscapes

- The uncomfortable conditions caused the painter to collaborate with a photographer, Andrew Watson, and together they created trench aerial shots. After photographing the area, they 'sewed' the images together using an image software programme and created an image with a 20x40m dimension

- Callery commissioned the making of a large pan chest, so to place each individual square print into a drawer, as he wanted the viewer to have to open the drawers to physically move across the surface

- By increasing the viewer-work interaction, Callery hoped the visitor would gain a better grasp of the archeological dig's surface and it would help prolong the experience of the artwork

- Callery also used material from the site, as he got casting experts from the local foundry to cast the walls of the trenches. The dimension of this work was equally large- 20 x 2m wide.

- The artist then approached English Heritage and they agreed to house this large casted piece in Dover, so linking the white clay cast to the white clifts of Dover.

- When presenting the work, Callery carefully pieced together the squared casts and displayed them along a commissioned frame, which had to mirror the curves in the dig's trenches. This work had a very similar physical dimension to his lead white paintings

- Recently he has moved back to his studio practice and painting, though his work has a much greater physicality, which goes well with his newly discovered use of warm colours

- It is interesting to note that had I seen an image of his lead white paintings, then his clay casted wall installation, then his current circular, protruding warm paint works, I would never have seen such a strong correlation as I do now after his talk.