Make your own art on Saturday (22 March) at Lighthouse Poole, as prolific conceptual artist and award-winning gallerist Ben Oakley FRSA, who has curated the brilliant From the City to the Sea exhibition on show in the Main Gallery, is hosting a very special screenprint day. For free!
Ben has issued an open invitation to all; just turn up or use the link here https://tinyurl.com/3uhwyu8e from 11am until 4pm, and he’ll show you how to create your own screenprint using an exclusive one-off From the City to the Sea design.
All the materials are supplied, so just bring yourselves and have fun! Remember, though, there’s ink involved, so maybe don’t wear your best clothes!
Ben will also be available to talk about the incredible work on show, some of which has been made especially for the exhibition, by ten different artists. One of the featured artists, sculptor Bobby Tonge, is also going to be visiting to see his fantastic bronze sculptures of everyday items – just one of many highlights in an inspirational show of contemporary art.
Bobby is returning to Poole for the first time in 40 years, having spent the summer of 1985 working at the Haven Hotel at Sandbanks.
I was doing an art foundation course and spent the summer hitching round the UK,” he explains. “I got a lift with someone who worked at Channel Four, who took me to Bournemouth and showed me the locations they’d been shooting at. After I was dropped off, I went to the Job Centre to find some work.
“That’s how I ended up at the Haven Hotel at Sandbanks as a lowly pot wash. The day before I started, the hotel had been visited by police running checks on staff – it was a few months after the Brighton bomb – and some of them had disappeared, so I was made up to KP (kitchen porter) straight away and then to commis chef.
“That’s how I ended up cooking. Without that job, things would have been very different.”
Art being a somewhat precarious living, Bobby pursued a parallel career in food and has gone on to cook in kitchens from Manchester to New Zealand. Today, alongside his art practice, he runs a successful business catering to film and TV productions on location.
Which is partly how he hit upon the idea of casting foodstuffs in bronze.
“I started making sculptures in papier-mâché and had my first solo exhibition in Paris in 1994. I picked up a few commissions, but it never really felt right until I found myself working for a French bronze furniture maker and being encouraged to cast in bronze.”
His first bronze casts were pork pies.
“Shifting from paper to bronze, it was surprising how much more seriously the work was taken. I’m fascinated by things that are slightly banal. As we walk through our day, it’s full of things, objects, everyday items, some we eat, some we throw away, small things, ordinary things. I’ve been casting them in bronze to make them permanent, infinite, reconsidered.
“I once got pulled over by French customs with two Jammy Dodgers in bronze that had just been cast at a French foundry and looked like they had been dug up. The French authorities were concerned and asked as they picked one up, ‘Is this antique?’ ‘Mmm, no (well, not yet), I replied.’”
From the City to the Sea runs until Saturday, 19 April, and is free to see daily from 10am whenever Lighthouse is open.
More information at https://www.lighthousepoole.co.uk/event/from-the-city-to-the-sea/
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/from-the-city-to-the-sea-tickets-1284238886079
