+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
“You’ll never see that city again” - a line from William Kentridge’s Opera ‘Sybl’ that I totally feel upon leaving New York never again will it have the same people and be the same place which I was lucky enough to see. Fucking loved it.
Appears above in the final painting of the New York Panorama series “Place People go to Fly”.
Theodora Click Here for puppets and peformance work!!!
These are paper people, the first use of the portable studio (seen in use above). I made the studio in response to the lack of a personal studio space being available here at pratt. Studio had always been fundamental to my artistic practice even in sixth form when I would create the bulk of my work outside of classroom in a studio I had made in my bedroom! I discovered using the portable studio that the balance of input and output was completley thrown off suddenly i was walking around inputting from the sights and smells of the street and outputting using the drawing board in front of me at the very same time! This had the effect of tunneling my attention - I could only latch onto the ‘details’ of the world aroubd me - the texture of a wall, a strangers face, the way a branch seems to melt in the wind. I then took these traces back to the classroom and tried to construct my understanding of people out of them. In a way i think this is what I am constantly doing anyway trying to guess at who people are based off traces of their clothes, their face and the architecture around them.
A short Puppet show, written, designed and performed in the pub (or the american bar equivalent in the east village) by the two and a half months to go collective.
Click Image for raw PDF of sketchbook keeping of New York Month 1
Work made for one of my shiny new classes (such a different system from home) focused on colour in painting. And this thing is kicking my ass, I gotta face up to so many bits of painting I hadn’t realised I’d been scared of before now. The best example being to just put colour on canvas without a gimmick - like before now I would always have a 3D or unexpected elemnt that the *viewer* can at least say oh that’s clever to. That’s the other thing I always hold the critic/viewer inside me while I make, it don’t belong in that space I gotta just purely pursue my own interests and pleasure and fears while at the easel analyise afterward and be self critical not objective critical.
Made just before the new city
It was whole I arrive in this city. It’s fractured I hope to leave it. For i hope to feel to live and to fail while here. because if not here, then where? (view from my room and hedonistic teenage philosophy thoughts)
I was feeling majorly down on this last period of my work, but looking back even though i’ve been a bit lost and confused, swinging from concept to technique to feeling an odly cohesive and interesting body of work has formed. And some very clear lines of enquiry have been sustained throughout... I know where I must take it from here. (but also its at a point it can be left to start afresh in Brooklyn) 24th august 2025
I think this is as far as I take this painting. I’ve been very slowly poking it for over half a year now and I just have to accept it and move on. I’m done, ready to paint more instinctively I can only hope.
Look at this duuude
Modern wayfaring consists of the faces one meets on the road becoming part of the landscape, as austere and unreadable as mounds, potholes and trunks. Here the heads fall into the crevice of the land with its new horizon line (the double yellow lines at the side of the road).
Aquatint on wye valley etching.
The painting/minature instilation based off the modern wayfaring of the NX 40 bus between bristol and london.
This guy was made directly before leaving glasgow the most clear cut version of a virginity demon I have. A couple of image works now feature this specific demon too.
I’ve been drawing every friend who comes through my bedroom studio for long enough to be captured. They are of no relation to the skull like heads below...
Strange totem like head, recently discovered by the artist. What is simply incredible about them is upon carbon dating they were found to be over 60,000 years old making them the oldest record of human civilisation to date. (found on the road)
On the 12th of July 2025 in Bolsena, Italy, a minor upheaval occured in the square next to the towns historic Santa Christina church. A strange man had walked in by way of the old Pilgrims route, a stranger to the land, but then again he seemed a stranger to all lands. He perhaps came from another time, and seemed somewhat disgruntled by the present. Still he was nice enough and was observed to say ‘Bon Jorno’ to all he passed. Some field recordings were found of his journey...
The drawing that best captures the feeling of the campsite by Lake Bolsena, Italy.
The complete portfolio of drawings from a weeks camping at lake Bolsena, Italy. This includes the good, the bad and the ugly and provide something of a glimpse into how I try to understand things when ploncked into a new place. The campsite was about 1.5 km away from the Via Francigena - one of the oldest known pilgramidge routes. It runs from Cantebury, England to Rome, Italy and was first recorded being walked through the writings of the bishop Cergirac who walked it in 900 AD. I have a personal connection to this route already having walked the first couple of hundred km last easter - it represents the all too rareified ancinet uses of the roads. To walk the paths that make it up provide a glimpse at how travelling through the land once was. 15th august 2025
Purely imaginative memoery drawing, getting lost and hot and sweaty at the awkwardness or moral ambiguity of the memory. This is two years ago - Interailling with a friend from sixth form of whom I emiediatly fell out of contact with upon starting Art School. She is sat across the table from the viewer with frizzy hair. Our main disagreement was I suppose mystacism - i think she came away with the distinct feeling I might lead a cult in my future.
Wandering Lance Free figure, of my marrionette sculptures often made to physically place a specific demon or creature I find clung to myself or another soul.
Transporting the Mural painting to it’s unveiling venue. Thanks to Charllotte for the help with painting and Nina for the help with the design.
Photos from the performance, I’ve started editing together the video...
A sketchbook page I was thinking of submitting to a drawing open call a friend sent to me but got cold feet at the last moment. It’s styled as a map inspired by recent curiosity walks i’ve been taking through the west end of Glasgow.
BEHIND THE SCENES VIDEO FOR PERFORMANCE PIECE: *Magical link Button*
Faces of the lamp