Artists in Residence



Artist: Graham Wyatt

Graham Wyatt was born in 1972 in the small Somerset mining community of Kilmersdon. His formative years coincided with the eradication of Kilmersdon's once thriving mining industry, and the resulting economic and psychological hardship instilled a strong political outlook in his early work. (see 'Sunset on Thatcher's slag-heap,' 1985) These early works, with paper and biro, were largely experimental and have now been disowned by the artist. Shortly after jointly founding the Worsley Institute of Blu-Tack Art in 1997, he was interviewed for the magazine Zeitschrift fur Bildhauerkunst der Blu-Tack D: Durchfuhrung der Worsley Gesellschaft, and spoke of his reasons for this self-censorship.

"In 1997 I was introduced to Blu-Tack by my colleague Dr Rhiannon Purdie, and immediately found it to be a natural and effective means of fulfilling my artistic vision. At once so simple, yet so polymorphous and essentially dichotomous, I could see that all my previous work was a mere shadow compared to the star-burst potentialities of this new medium."

In the Institute catalogue then, we can view Wyatt's new Blu-Tack aesthetic. At once classically simple, sound in technique, imaginative in concept, visceral in appeal, and containing throughout, an intellectual and passionate subtext propagating an essentially optimistic hermeneutical analysis.






Artist: Dr Rhiannon Purdie

Rhiannon Purdie's childhood is shrouded in a mystery that this intensely private artist refuses to elucidate beyond admitting, tantalisingly, that it `involved a lot of snow`. (H.G.F. Bernstein sets forth the accepted view that she alludes to the intensely individualised whirling fog of creative genius (Necrophilia 1996), but cf. J. E. Lillycrop, (Civic 1968) for a different interpretation.) Purdie's dedication to her artistic vision is legendary: probably the most famous example of it is the astounding four years she spent under cover purportedly writing a PhD in Medieval English in order to gain access to the British Library Manuscripts Room to create her undisputed, albeit as yet undiscovered, masterpiece `Wanhope`. The pages of one hundred and forty-four medieval manuscripts were painstakingly stuck together with a compound of her trademark medium blu-tack and super-glue, expressing the anguished futility of all attempts to read, comprehend or otherwise internalise these tragi-historical relics of the literary (un)imagined past. This work has put the new school of 'futilism' on the artistic map of the '90s, but with characteristic vigour, Rhiannon Purdie herself has already moved on into post-futile optimistic perspectivism, as exemplified by her more recent sculpture `Stretch`. A co-founder of the Institute of Blu-Tack Art with fellow artist Graham Wyatt, she now works selflessly to promote the expression of blu-tack ideation among the next generation of blu-tack amorosi.




Visiting Artist

Artist: Sian James This elusive artist is rarely seen, even within the Institute. She refuses all interviews, and as an expression of her persuasive conviction of the fundamentally transitory nature of la condition humaine, will only permit year old passport photos of herself to be released (for any physical record is necessarily of the past). The Institute is very fortunate to be able to display one of this artist's rare creations. Her excruciatingly meticulous artistic ethos will only allow the production of one work a year, lest one work impinge upon the temporal space of the other. We must all hope the artistic germination of her next work will issue, after a climate of heady anticipatory fervour, in a beatific creative flowering.