19 Apr 2012 to 25 May 2012
Monday – Friday, 9:30am – 5:00pm
the Japan House Gallery
Professor Edward Allington, Head of Graduate Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, will present a series of drawings of trees, small fires and Japanese joints. Some are based upon the famous screen by Kano Eitoku (1543 – 1590), Cypress Trees, now in the Tokyo National Museum, some from other Japanese prints, some from observation, and others from comic books and a children’s guide to Japanese carpentry.
Drawing has always been important to Allington. He collects volumes of ledgers, once used by companies for their financial records. Most are leather-bound and on extremely high quality paper. The entries, some faded, are in neat and formal manuscript. Allington draws over the rows of figures and texts, which add a layer of their own history to his ideas for sculpture or sculptural diagrams. Allington says, “Sometimes the information on the paper gives me ideas as to how the drawing might develop. But the main reason [I use ledger paper] is because these are records of everyday life. I want there to be a contradiction between my illusionistic style of drawing and the paper. If you read the writing on the paper, you have to ignore the drawing, and if you want to read the drawing, you have to ignore the writing.”
Professor Edward Allington was born in 1951 in Troutbeck Bridge, Cumbria. He studied at Lancaster College of Art, Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design, and the Royal College of Art. Allington came to prominence in the early 1980s when his work was included in influential group exhibitions such as Objects and Sculpture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1981) and The Sculpture Show at the Hayward Gallery (1983). Since then he has exhibited widely in America, Japan and throughout Europe, and is represented in major national and international collections such as the Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK, and the Aichi Prefectural Museum in Japan. He was a Sargant Fellow at the British School in Rome (1997) and a Gregory Fellow in Sculpture at the University of Leeds (1991-93). He is a regular contributor to art magazines such asFrieze, and a book of his collected essays, A Method for Sorting Cows, was published in 1997. Allington is Head of Graduate Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
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