+447535958939
barnabywessell@gmail.com
2025
2024
2023
Select perfomance and projects
Sketchbooks
About
+447535958939
barnabywessell@gmail.com
2025
2024
2023
Select perfomance and projects
Sketchbooks
About
Drawing of both ‘Boughcliff’ the old home of my paternal grandparents and the lovely folks of Glasgow at a dinner party in our flat on Sauchiehall street, pencil on paper
Screenshots from the free 3d software Blender. I’ve been using it to construct stage set like spaces with drawings I made in the studio.
LAB LAB LAB
Animation frames from an ancinet egyptian sarcophagus head at the burrel coolection, drawn on site in my ledger sketchbook directly from the artefact.
Further mono prints, starting to experiment with the forms of the tetra packs also being included, sometimes run through the press after, sometimes at the same time.
A second wave of tetra pack prints. The idea i took forwards from the first lot was cutting the plates to be in the shape of tomb maps, such as the guides printed in encyclopedias of ancient egypt, filling their contents with my own designs. The 4th print fromt the left is actaully in the shape of Tutenkhamun’s tomb (although flipped as I forgot to account for this). I’m most pleased with the 3rd one though, it’s really fun incorporating the faces and forms of the Schwabtis - they feel like playing pieces to me - sort of stand ins for the viewer in the work I’m making.
After a crit with Mary and Allergra in summer and a talk with Jacob I began to feel that I might of lost confidence in my making. I dont think this is true now, just that my way of making was changing, but this prompted a period of drawing as a return to a place of pure excitement and possibility (away from what I percieved to be the pressure of painting).
Tetraaa paaaks - I had a premonition of wanting to make a shaped etching plate. This was after seeing the Schwabtis at the cambridge archeological museum and wating to replicate the figurine approach and sillouhette in image making. The crazy thing I realiesed is this could be done with tetra packs - I gained a bit of a reputation as tetra pack mad in june.
I
went on a research trip to Cambridge university following a lead from my Grandma about some antique books of days donated to Girton college by her mother (my great grandma). I thought these could belonged to the bishop badger, and had links to the same time period as the crusades, which had been emerging as a bit of a metaphor for his relationship to egypt. It was amazing touching the Vellum of the books, but an unexpected discovery was of schwabtis in the archeology department. I could feel their anger through the display case, and started working from their form.
Small Drawings no bigger than 15cm wide all made in service of the paintings from the great great grandfathers perspective. Used as a method of thinking about hands, perspective and composition. They were practically driven in their creation but felt really important to me as small art objects in their own right.
This point marks a shift in my making. I refocus around one story, a few months later writing this statement to understand what I begin making:
Barnaby starts with a shameful yet fantastical story. His great, great grandad, a British army chaplain in
1923 Egypt, attended the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. At first a source of anecdote, a recent
rethinking began to unravel the colonial roots and his implicit connection 100 years later. The artist
attempts to see through the eyes of the army chaplain and the world he inhabited, employing the first-
person perspective and bringing the legacy of the empire back to one of its many present world contexts:
videogames and their use as ideological tools. First person shooter games often have maps set in middle
eastern towns, strangely deserted while kill squads war on repeat. Barnaby never played these since even
their boxes sold in WHSmith were enough to pose the mortifying question to the then 10-year-old “are my
hands the right shape for a gun?”.
I’d already started thinking about videogames as a tool for understanding this, but it takes quite a while for any of their infleunce to actually feel present in the art work.
Ok some-one stole my sketchbook, it was clipped to a drawing board outside the stow print room. It was an A3 sketchbook and had some sick drawings in that I never even photographed. I want it back!