It might be a little confusing for visitors to our group exhibition, Semblance, in September, as all three artists are called Phil. One of us is Phill with a double ‘l’ but it doesn’t help all that much so here’s an introduction to Phil Gomm, friend and fellow exhibitor.

Phil will be showing a series of photographic prints for our show. I’ve had a first glimpse of some of the images recently and they’re spellbinding:

Photograph by Phil Gomm, May 2016

Phil is Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts degree course at the University of Creative Arts (UCA).  Based at UCA’s Rochester campus, he lives a couple of streets away here in Whistable and, with his professional eye, he’s been a great support to me as I develop my own work this year. On the Computer Animation Arts degree course he’s pioneered blogs as a teaching and learning tool and you can see his latest ‘Post with the Most’ (PWTM) –  a regular pick of students’s work and general update – here. This edition  includes third year students final animation projects and they are marvellous; touching, sad, funny, dark, sweet and very human, they’re knockout.  I love reading these posts, if I had another lifetime I’d be applying for Phil’s course, it looks hard work but so rewarding and so much fun.

For the Semblance exhibition this year Phil is developing his exploration of long exposure photography combined with moving lights to create scenes humming with spectral apparitions and presences winking in and out of our mundane earthly dimensions. The spectacular images here were taken in an old, empty house in Rochester. The dusty surfaces, peeling paint and empty rooms make stunning stages for the trails of ectoplasm and who knows what that inhabit this house while the ordinary world walks past the shuttered windows outside, oblivious. He’s  planning to do some more work in the house at night, a prospect which would, frankly, scare the bejeezus out of me, but Phil is made of sterner stuff. I can’t wait to see what other phantasmagoria Phil manages to capture in his experiments.

Photographs by Phil Gomm, May 2016

We Phils have shown work together at the Horsebridge twice before. As I’ve said previously, It’s so much more enjoyable putting on an exhibition with friends and fellow artists and sharing the ups and downs of the experience together rather than holding it all yourself. Here are a few snaps of Phil and his work from previous shows:

Phil is also a talented writer, and his trilogy Chimera, was published in 2014. The book follows a boy, Kip, who gets lost in the world of Chimera, a place populated with all things lost, forgotten, or discarded, each trying to deal with their predicament in their own way. Phil’s powers of imagining and story making are such that, in another lifetime (in addition to the one where I do his animation course) I would illustration the whole story, as there are scenes on every page that are an illustrators dream. Chimera is available on Amazon.

And the man himself:

Next post – Phil 2: Phill Hosking.

Lincoln Green is that rich, slightly olive green that was produced by the dyers in Lincoln, near where I grew up, many centuries ago. It became associated with Robin Hood who lived in Sherwood Forest, over the border in Nottinghamshire. The little village I’ve been imagining recently, Midville Bridge, is set, in my mind at least, somewhere on Lincoln Heath, and the village pub is called The Green Man. The images are going a bit green too. 

I made another model cottage this week, mainly to use as a compositional aid for some drawings I’m going to do for an exhibition later this year:

While the colour might be harking back to associations with my native Lincolnshire, the architecture is also being influenced by what I’m seeing around me in Kent. I’ve been based back in Whistable for over three months now while I’m working in the UK for a while, and the local vernacular architecture is seeping into my work a bit, perhaps with a bit of an expressionist twist. There are quite a few lovely little cottages in the town, many using the traditional materials often used for building in Kent, such a flint and timber weatherboarding. Here are a few photos I took the other day, during a grey afternoon unfortunately:

Ok, so the last one isn’t exactly a cottage. Anyway, I’ll be producing some drawings from the photographs of the models over the coming weeks – well that’s the theory anyway, better start this weekend! 

A lot of the images I’ve been working on in recent months have been pretty gothic, exploring the ambience of 1920s German Expressionist film, or a sense of the uncanny. But now it’s mid May, the hedgerows are positively frothing with green and wild flowers and I want to make some images that have something actually growing and not just the claw-like witchy trees of a spooky forest or blasted Heath. So while the witchy trees are still in attendance, there’s some actual foliage going on too, a semblance of Spring is creeping in and the colour palette is warming up, just like the weather 😎 

There are some films that, these days, find themselves in ‘top ten folk horror movies’ lists but feel a little bit like they’ve been shoehorned into the category, perhaps because they are just great films and FH enthusiast want to claim them as their own.

My friend Phil asked me over to watch just such a film the other night. I’ve been wanting to see Picnic at Hanging Rock for years and years and just never got around to it. I knew i would love it, and I did, in fact I absolutely adored it. It really defies any genre, it’s a strange, beautiful, haunting and very unusual film; not may films like this have ever been made and there are certainly few being made now.

Despite lots of space, and scenes with little or no dialogue, there is so much going on in the movie; the unique relationships and emotional worlds of women and between women, emerging sexuality, longing, wilting languor, English middle class buttoned up repression, regret, love, lust, violence, time, death, and the hint of ancient supernatural powers. All unfolding within the extraordinary colour palette of the Australian landscape. Dreamlike sequences, slow motion, stuttering camera shots, double exposures and fades all contribute to the sense of disorientation, mystery, and tension. I loved the soft, warm colours, high tones, and the heat that seeped out of almost every shot. The film is still with me today and I wanted to explore different moods and atmospheres with some images i’ve been working on this evening:

The script contains some very strange monologues and dialogues, poetic and off kilter, and some of the performances are stunning, not least Rachel Roberts as the bitter and bullying headmistress of the college. A great but difficult to categorise soundtrack completes the mysterious picture – i’ve still got the ethereal pan pipes playing in my head!

The term ‘folk horror’ appears to have been coined by Piers Haggard in a 2003 interview with Fangoria magazine when he was talking about his 1971 film Blood on Satan’s Claw. It swiftly came to be associated with a small group of British films during the 1970s, the most well-known, and probably most successful on many levels, being The Wicker Man. But over recent years the term has been continuously re-examined and redefined as more and more films , from all over the world, have been put forward which take the genre into different territories. The scope has widened unrecognisably from the original cluster of ’70s British films. It’s a term that’s now quite difficult to define succinctly and there’s probably little point in trying. Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, released in 2011 can be found in top ten folk horror film lists these days, and many other films that look nothing like Blood on Satan’s Claw are being covered by the folk horror umbrella in essays, articles and online forums. A growing number of interpretations and theories are flourishing, and I’m not going to add to them, although a hint of the uncanny and use of the landscape and weather are usually part of the mix for me. I think folk horror is something you know when you see it, it’s a certain atmosphere or sensation that prickles up the back of your neck rather than a particular subject matter such as witches covens or supernatural goings on in the British countryside.

I was certainly drawn to the children’s TV programmes that leaned towards folk horror when i was growing up, programmes like Children of the Stones, or The Owl Service. I’ve use a bit of lurid late ’60s and early ’70s colour in some of these images, which i’m liking, they remind me of some prog rock concept album covers, another genre which I love!

And talking of music, Radiohead released a much anticipated new album, A Moon Shaped Pool last week and their new video, to go with the first song released from the album was a terrific stop motion animation film directed by Chris Hopewell which looked like Trumpton meets The Wicker Man. I love the track too, if you haven’t already seen it theres a link here. I’m a big fan of Radiohead for lots of reasons, one of them being their use of animation in many of their videos. My favourite is another Chris Hopewell film for There There, inspired, in part, by Bagpuss apparently, but whatever, the cat wedding is seriously creepy; you can see it here.

Music plays an important part of many of classic folk horror films of the ’70s. I was at some friends for dinner last week and we put on the soundtrack to Wicker Man as it was May Day, but I was taken aback by how seriously good it is, how evocative, sensual and eerie. A folk horror film that initially sunk without trace after it was released in 1970 was Tam Lin, the only film directed by Roddy McDowell, which had an awesome cast (including Ava Gardner) and as perfect a folk horror soundtrack as you could wish for. The film has only just been made available again on Blu-ray after all these years, but this clip was on You Tube and includes a gorgeous track by Pentangle. The clip also gives you an idea of what a strange, slightly ridiculous but rather good film it was.

I think my own images recently are more folk tale and dark fairy tale than folk horror, which is not surprising as this whole stream of work started with an exploration of the world of Hansel and Gretel for the promotional film I’m making with the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins for his new picture book edition of the story. Clive has created a Pinterest board with some of the images we’ve created to get in the mood for the film, you can see it here. The board includes some of Clive’s  fabulous preparatory drawings for the book; from what I’ve seen it’s going to be a unique, gruesomely gorgeous take on the tale, and I can’t wait to see it come out in all it’s glory. Here are a few more of my Hansel and Gretel-themed images, using the model of the witch’s cottage I made last year:

An excellent book containing a collection of essays and interviews on the subject was published last year. Titled Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, it’s one of the first real attempts to examine the genre in detail. The collection was put together by Andy Paciorek and 100% of profits from sales go to the Wildlife Trust too – it’s available on Amazon. One contributor is John Coulthart and there’s  a very nice post with some fab images on John’s superb [feuilleton] blog here.

I think that folk horror, whatever it is, infuses quite a bit of my work. I grew up in rural Lincolnshire, a county which i’ve said before on here is really quire gothic when you get under the skin of it, so that might be how it seeped into me from an early age. Either that or watching too much Children of the Stones.

I made some images at the weekend with this model landscape placed against a totally black background. It was an interesting experiment but the totally black void was a bit disconcerting, like an alien planet. So I’ve added a few stars and tried to capture some dappled moonlight with this image and I think I prefer it not quite so otherworldly! 

After posting some evening twilight images at the weekend, a night time sky follows fairly naturally I suppose. I took these using a black back cloth that Jan had set up in our living room for some photography he’s doing for an exhibition he’s got coming up later in the year. Being an artist who knows nothing about photography, having a photographer husband comes in  sooooo handy and he’s been very patient with me so far – ‘how do you take the lens cap off?’ Etc. I’ve always photographed against a painted sky but I’ve rather enjoyed working on these images against a totally black void, using tiny model houses and trees set in an infinity of black. 

I guess this is a glass half full or half empty kind of image; you can read it as either a scene of some terrible blight that has decimated the bare brown hills in the distance and is creeping up to the very doorstep of the little cottage (ecology and global warming issues – tick) or the first green shoots of an emerging garden that is going to blossom outwards and green the whole of this bare planet; I hope it’s the latter! 



I’m home in Berlin this weekend and I’ve been re-photographing some models I made last year using one of Jan’s decent cameras. He’d been doing some photography in the living room and had left the lighting set up so I snuck in quick to make use of it!

 I’ve been trying to capture twilight moods in particular, the hour when light and dark are melded together and something magical happens. I’ve always loved the rich colours and atmosphere of Autumn Leaves by Millais (a link to the painting here) and I want to try and express the time after the sun has set but the sky is still glowing with reflected light.
Here’s a sepia toned version:

I’ve been photographing quite a few twilight skies off Whitstable beach over the last couple of weeks. The different layers of cloud make for some spectacular sunsets and sometimes the colours just keep intensifying long after the sun has gone down. 

And to finish, another version of the same tower image. I’m flying back to the UK tomorrow so I’ll do some more shots in the morning before I go back to my dim bulb table lamp and 50p torch lighting set up!

Later in the year, on the last day of August, me and my two friends Phil Gomm and Phill Hosking are having a group show in the Somerset Maugham gallery at The Horsebridge Centre in Whitsable. We’ve show together twice before and I’ve also had two solo shows at the Horsebridge in recent years. I actually prefer exhibiting with friends, it’s more fun, the highs and the lows (pictures falling off the wall and smashing, that kind of thing) can be shared and it can offer the opportunity to show in a bigger and better space than if I was showing by myself. And I just happen to be living about 20 yards from the gallery at the moment so that’s going to make transporting all the stuff that bit easier!

As well as all being called Phil, the three of us also live within a couple of streets of each other in the town of Whitstable on the north Kent coast. My main home is in Berlin these days but I’m over in Kent working for a few months so it’s easy to meet up with my fellow exhibitors for a chat and to see each other’s work in progress.

We’ve been batting ideas for a title back and forth recently. It’s always a challenge and this year we wanted to find something that reflected the common ground in our creative work, the intersection in the Venn diagram of our three different approaches. We were drawn to ‘semblance’ because of its diverse meanings, relevant to each of our different bodies of work but which also offered ways into seeing the exhibition as a whole. There are flickers and traces of Phil and Phill’s creativity in my own work and vice versa; we have all, to some extent, been digesting each others’ work for quite a few years and taking the subtle flavours of each on board into our own making. Here are some dictionary definitions, broad enough to allow for plenty of musings while viewing the show:

Semblance 

1. Outward aspect or appearance.

2. An assumed or unreal appearance; show.

3. The slightest appearance or trace.

4. A likeness, image, or copy.

5. A spectral appearance; apparition. 

I guess ‘semblance’ for me, thinking about my own work, is about the transformation of materials, about how things can look, change, and yet carry the faintest echo of their origins which gives them their very own character, even when reworked as something else entirely – a kitchen roll tube becoming a witch’s tower for example! To illustrate the idea, I’m  including some images of the Hansel and Gretel inspired model landscape I made last year in this post. It’s all paper, card and paint, but the working of the materials and the medium of photography gives it the semblance of something very different. 

I’m sure this is a very common experience but I feel behind schedule at the moment, but I’m also sure it will all be all right on the day and the work will get made in time (that’s optimism for you!). 

I’ll post some images of work going into the exhibition nearer the time of the show and provide some links to my co-exhibitor’s work,  but for now, time to get busy!

Well it’s May Day, the Morris dancers are out and Facebook is full of Wicca Man memes. So I thought it was timely to post these images, taken by a webcam set up in Midville Bridge by Daphne the postmistress. The village had been having more than its fair share of peculiar goings on so Daphne has been trying to capture on video who or what is responsible. When she went through the recorded films she found some unearthly apparitions wandering about the streets in the middle of the night which was quite unsettling she tells me.

Photographs of the ghostly spectres are very rare but here’s one taken by Capt. ‘Black’ Sam Cole, the retired pirate who lives at the old lighthouse on yeh outskirts of the village. It seems to be some sort of ball of light perched on top of the chapel:

Nothing very spooky happening in Whitstable today, but we did listen to the Wicker Man soundtrack over dinner last night 😉