+ christil trumpet blog

Anyone who is interested in seeing our new work please go to www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimandprendergast - we try to keep our artwork/CV pages up to date on Axis at least but unfortunately have not yet managed to create a new site to replace this one

We have now moved into our new studio at Room 15 The Old Academy, Stromness. It is a wonderful light airy space but due to incredibly high rentals charged by the Council we will not be able to stay very long. It is at least tiding us over until our holiday let business is sold and our new house extension is completed. However unless we can find a way of reducing or subsidising the rent for this studio this has to be seen as a temporary location only. It is exciting being in this great new space although we are trying not to allow ourselves to settle in too much. It very refreshing being located in the hub of the renewable industry and intersting to be working next to post graduate students at ICIT (Heriot Watt) and to see lots of new faces and glimpse other worlds. For example EMEC has some intriguing looking sculptural devices sitting outside on the concrete platform beside their offices. These are part of the ongoing testing and research to find ways to harness the waves and tides we assume but to us this gives the building the look to a sculpture department in an art college! We have had lots of interesting visitors since we arrived and this in turn is generating new ideas and much creativity.

I was browsing through the magazine, Modern Painters, yesterday when I discovered that some of the things we were planning to create have already been made by an artist called Frances Trombly, who was being interviewed at the back of the magazine. I do not know why this discovery only excites, rather than disappoints us, as you might expect? I guess learning that another artist has been exploring many of the same ideas and is already a step ahead of us in realising and gaining recognition for them, means we can now move on from where she has left off? It doesnt really matter who gets there first as long as someone does get there sooner rather than later.

It is also thrilling to learn that others are traversing similar territory to ourselves because it makes us feel worldly and in tune with a greater creative process than we were previously aware of.

Anyhow we still have plenty more roads to take and places to visit and explore along the way. We have just moved into our new studio; Room 15 at the Old Stromness Academy, and have yet to decide which creative direction to pursue first in this amazing new work space.

Meanwhile please take a look at this artists work - in particular at the old receipt lying on the floor and the overall artwork in situ, complete with hand crafted mop and bin liner and flattened out cardboard box - all made from fabric, crochet and embroidery. Wonderful!

http://francestrombly.com/works/

Summer has been truly summery so far this year and we are all in a permanantly sleepy, sunny, woozy state, with the school holidays now well underway. We are shortly to move studios and realise this soporiphic state cannot continue for much longer - we need to get on with boxing up the decades and so will have to sharpen up our act. Having just returned from a week in Edinburgh and a visit to an exhibition at Timespan in the Highlands where we are the current Showcase Artists, we are full of ideas for future projects.

Meanwhile an excellent online article has been written by Sidney-based Lorna Johnston about our piece called Fall Fig Leaves, Farewell to a Flimsy Disguise. Here are the links to both pages and I should also say that the whole Arts Big Picture site is very interesting to browse and the articles are all articulate, well researched and thought provoking;

http://www.artsbigpicture.com/fall1.htm
http://www.artsbigpicture.com/fall2.htm

New Artist Statement - 2009
Known formerly as Christil Trumpet, for us collaboration is a symbiotic process and it is our common intention to provoke thoughts about the nature of beauty and relationships through our art practice. We enjoy following each other’s lead, celebrating our own individual, varying and frequently inconsistent styles

Our work often grows across walls and surfaces, meeting and diverging, pairing and splitting, following our shared or separate streams of consciousness, enabling us to work prolifically and allowing an aesthetic dialogue to take place between us.

We use a diverse range of materials and techniques, from embroidery thread and buttons, to paint and lead pencil - each of which is adapted to fit each project, exhibition or commission.

Taking a holistic and darkly humorous approach to being artists enables us achieve a great deal. Censorship in all its forms intrigues, amuses and often infuriates us - we have recently used the fig leaf as an ironic method of self censorship. We are preoccupied with the ‘throwaway’ and we set out to leave clues to aspects of our own lives while also leaving space for the viewer to speculate or make up their own stories. We do this by using everyday items such as games, old envelopes, memos/ sticky fixers, toys, clothes, jottings and doodles as our subjects.

Looking hard at things that would normally be thought throwaway, seeing the extraordinary in things that are considered to be ordinary is a characteristic of our art practice. In many of our works there are clues to lives lived and a tenderness given to the lost and discarded.

I’ve just discovered that our RACH page has been updated so in case you are interested here is the link.
http://www.rach-art.org.uk/Tumimandprendergast.htm

http://www.davidshrigley.com/

And when you’ve finished checking Shrigley out you could then go back to: http://travellinglight09.blogspot.com/

We heard yesterday that the piece of work with embroidered fig leaves called FALL (described in our previous March blog) has been selected for a show called Travelling Light. To see the image please feel free to check out our profile page on Axis (artists online resource) www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimandprendergast

Here is a brief description of this show taken from the original press release;

Travelling Light is a joint collaboration between WW Gallery and Pharos Gallery. The exhibition will open in London 14th to 28th May and will be hung in Venice 6th to 11th June, within the orbit of the Venice Biennale, in a palazzo between the Accademia Galleries and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Intending to stretch the artistic imaginations of its artists through imposing size and weight constraints, the work will travel along the trade route to Venice, a path historically well-trodden by merchants, libertines and young men coming of age, attracted to the pleasure capital of Europe. With its gambling houses and beautiful courtesans, a trip to Venice represented, in the words of J J Cale, A ONE WAY TICKET TO ECSTASY.

I hope that you can see why this brief inspired us to apply? We are proud and delighted to have been selected.
http://travellinglight09.blogspot.com/

Having had some other very good news last week we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary on Wednesday by eating out and then going to see Slum Dog Millionaire. I think our guardian angel must have woken up after a rather long snooze and decided to take some very positive action on our behalf!

More information to come shortly.

Considering we have both suffered two bouts of flu related viruses since December, we are actually ticking away very healthily on the creative front. We have just completed an artwork comprising thirty eight embroidered fig leaves which we have used to spell out the word FALL. Each fig leaf hangs on a pin and the overall impact is rather wonderful and rich - reminiscent of exotically coloured autumn leaves clinging delicately to a surface - suspended by an elusive natural trap such as spiders web perhaps? As an extension to this project we have also embroidered two larger images - one of a fig leaf and the other using the space around the fig leaf. Both are now contained within two transparent CD cases for a show to raise money for a local good cause.

www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimandprendergast

The two embroidery projects have been a bit of a distraction from the two sets of work we were meant to be focusing on before we became diverted by new deadlines. These two strands comprise of a series of pairs of miniature paintings called Duet and a set of trompe l’oeil envelope drawings. These are initially bound for a show in Sutherland in July but we also have other exciting plans in store for all of our new work.

While the recession may effect us one day soon where our small holiday let business and older children are concerned, we have not been aware of recession impacting on our art careers at all. Most artists struggle, continually making a supreme effort to raise the funds simply to have creative freedom and time in their studios, and in this regard we are no exception. However the possible effects of recession on the parts of the art world where huge sums of cash have been changing hands between artists, collectors and dealers for the past decade will make no difference to us. Perhaps it will even benefit us if experience, originality, sustainability of ideas and vision become a priority to the arts once more?

Greetings to anyone or everyone who stumbles across or even purposefully arrives at our blog page!

We are both as ready as we will ever be for the final countdown. We have no family visitors in Stromness this year and have received several invitations to be wined and dined over the festive period, which should hopefully keep us from drowning in the sea of our own dysfunctional family chaos. Prendergast - usually the chief cook of our household - is going to be working nights at the old folks home over Christmas and New Year period. I have therefore been watching the endless spate of tv chefs demonstrating their Christmas recipes with some interest this year. As a matter of fact I am just on my way to make Jamie Oliver mince pies - involving doing something arty with filo pastry? Well I can’t quite recall the finer details of what should go where but will give it a go anyway as it looked like fun and at least we will have something interesting to offer our hosts on Boxing Day - even if they do turn out to be inedible.

I also have a birthday coming up, a day I usually regard with some trepidation, making a point of getting in an proper Eyore worthy gloom well before it every year in the hope that I can then summon up some healthy indifference when the dreaded day finally arrives. Sounds rather bah humbug I know but what on earth were my parents thinking of, having their first child a week after Hogmanay? You would have thought my mother could have eaten a few more curries and driven over some bumps to give me a New Year’s entrance at least. I mean you really couldnt get a more miserable time of year to be born could you? Just as the decorations have come down, the Christmas cards have been cleared into bin bags (or filed away for their homemade loveliness), the empty bottles have been shoved through the heaving hole at the bottle bank and the bank statement telling you only bad things has just been posted through your letter box, the January winds are picking up to gale force plus sleet and everyone is generally knuckling grimly down to some serious abstinence. Oh well time to move swiftly on!

To update for those who havent been subjected to our Christmas special - an aesthetic round robin email - we successfully installed our artwork on the walls of the 2nd floor lift lobby at the Royal Aberdeen Childrens Hospital in November. It was a really good day for us but also quite a leveller. A little girl in a headscarf and slippers helped us to unwrap each of the polycarbonate panels while doctors, cleaners, nurses, administrators, patients and their fraught looking families came and went in and out of the lifts all day. Many managed a smile or a grin, an expression of approval or even delight and praise - but the tearful, anxious looking, distracted ones were also a reminder that while art can play a very positive role in any hospital, its not the first thing on most peoples minds.

I tried to think back to when I was in the old hospital as a parent with a sick child over thirteen years ago - would I have noticed the artwork on the walls if there had been any then? I like to think that I would have been cheered by anything that diverted the eye and the mind away from my reasons for being there but cannot be sure that I would have even noticed the artwork in my preoccupied state. Still we were happy to be able to give at least one child pleasure and many of the staff something new and colourful to look at. The feedback has been very positive so far.

If anyone wants to see some of the images of this work then please go to our Axis pages: www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimandprendergast
I have finally managed to upload some images of the new artwork, which is entitled Anecdotal Evidence.

Take care and have a good Christmas and New Year.

This is our first blog for a while because we have been so tied up with the Royal Aberdeen Childrens Hospital commission. This commission has taken us on a long and somewhat stressful journey during which we have considered many different paths, images, techniques and have hit a few brick walls on the way before at last finding the right direction.

We now have the go ahead to replicate our artwork/ designs onto Polycarbonate - which is a similar material to perspex. We are no longer working for the Theatre and Recovery Rooms but instead have been relocated to the 2nd floor lift lobby for what has been described as being a prestigious permanent exhibition for an area of the hospital which has a high foot fall. We were happy to be relocated as this new space suits our work better. In the end the hospital arts group felt that the theatre staff were looking for something that was not in keeping with our artistic output (they wanted a jungle/ Disney theme suitable for very brief and immediate viewing) and this is why we are now working to a new brief for a new space.

We are both excited with the artwork we have made for this new location. It is very much in keeping with our own professional and creative development. So, after a rather difficult period, all is now going well and we are shortly to subcontract the work of turning our paintings into 43 Polycarbonate units which will be installed in the hospital by December if all goes according to plan - fingers crossed! Here is our new statement for Axis, which we have adapted to fit in with the work we have just completed for this hospital commission.

Artist statement
For us collaboration is a symbiotic process and it is our common intention to provoke thoughts about the nature of beauty and relationships through our art practice. We aim to achieve this through using imagery relating to contemporary issues or ideas that in some way, whether directly or indirectly, have made an impact on our own lives. We find that taking a holistic and darkly humorous approach to being artists enables us achieve a great deal.

Woven into each of our painted or stitched constructions there is sometimes a narrative - but often the story only becomes apparent to us once the piece is complete. Using clusters of canvases of varying sizes we work with images and abstract painterly marks which we connect together intuitively. This approach is taking us in a direction that is reminiscent of the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear, Spike Milligan and Dr Zeuss. The artwork grows across walls and surfaces in an organic way, enabling us to work prolifically and allowing an aesthetic dialogue to take place between us.

We went to the Birsay rock pools today. These are large, deep, natural swimming pools in rock formations off the north western tip of Orkney. The boys brought friends and we brought towels, sun screen and ice cream. They all launched excitedly into the pools with Fred the dog scampering behind them, tail wagging frantically, behaving as though whole adventure had been laid on just for him. The water was icy and there were many shrieks and references to their male anatomy being under siege as they plunged and thrashed! I had forgotten to bring my camera, but realising I could still take some images on my trusty old mobile I clambered about the dark, sun drenched slabs of rock recording my boys and their friends to send off to parents and friends at some future moment. Proving that Orkney has actually had a heat wave - over a month of sunshine now - has become something of an obsession.

Suddenly, as I clicked and saved, some rock slime got the better of my flat healed pumps and the earth span as I hurtled in a 90% somersault, my mobile slipping out of my hand and smashing on rocks before landing broken in a rock pool. I fell once on my shoulder and then slipped again and landed head first in the same pool. Now sitting by a lovely fire, nursing quite a few scratches,bruises and a chill, I feel this is at least an opportune moment to tell those who care, where we are currently at in our artistic journey.

A month ago we tendered for and were successfully commissioned to create artwork for the theatre corridors and recovery rooms at the Royal Aberdeen Childrens Hospital http://www.rach-art.org.uk/artiststwo.htm. The brief is for the artist to work with children at a Kirkwall primary school called Glaitness, which also has a special facility for children with special needs. The children are helping us to create the work for the hospital by doodling and playing drawing games and focusing on their favourite things. The tight time scale (work to be completed and installed by mid December), the multiple stakeholders (pupils, hospital service users, families and staff) and the restrictions on materials with regard to fire safety and hygiene etc are going to be some the things that make this a very challenging project. On the plus side however the fee is quite good and it is exciting to be working with new materials (perspex/ acrylic) and new collaborators, including hospital staff. We usually rise well to a challenge.

Knowing that this new RACH project was going to have to start straight away we thought that we had better complete the Papdale Pupils Wave www.papdaletrumpets.co.uk - a wave to be created using drawn on labels - now to be titled the Pupils Tornado. A tornado rather than a wave now because we were given a rectangular frame to work with instead of the expected square, and of course waves, being vortexes, dont belong inside rectangular spaces! We took the frame back to our studio and worked intensively, hanging the hundreds of hand drawn and cut labels onto a tornado shaped out of wire mesh, suspended in a deep frame with a perspex roof for lighting. Once all the labels were hung we had some doubts about whether it even remotely resembled a tornado - it seems that a tornado is a rather unshapely thing once isolated in a rectangular box. Labels usually hang down of course and a tornado should probably have diagonals to make it twist appropriately, but I am afraid ours doesnt. We have tried to make it more tornado-like by bringing through a label cloud down from the perspex roof, but I still do not know whether it resembles one at all. However I do find that once again I am seduced by the detail of all these drawings on mass. I love the shadows and the solid form created from the layers of labels. We are just waiting for Papdale Primary School to fulfil its side of the bargain by installing some reinforced glass. Then we hope to get it installed before the summer holidays - but have absolutely no idea what the children or staff will make of it!

The Hope nursery wall flowers are also complete and awaiting health and safety checks before being installed in the nursery courtyard next week. We can at least say that we have so far delivered the goods on time, to budget and according to the brief on all our projects to date. On the negative side there always seems to be a hiccup on the part of commissioners following an invoice for completed work. I am starting to empathise strongly with small contractors such as builders and small firms of architects. Life is hard when you are constantly chasing money owed, in order to get food on the table and pay off your own bills on time. A month or two means very little to those who are paid a regular wage or who have big businesses with high turnovers - but for those of us who live on relatively low wages and rely on commissioners to honour their obligations, it can be really hellish and even sometimes be a question of make or break.

Well time I think for a mug of hot chocolate to keep the aches, pains and chill at bay. The wind has picked up and the sunshine has been replaced by dense fog - but it will return tomorrow surely? The optimism of previous posts was not misplaced and on the whole life is sunny and sweet - but I shall have to keep my eyes and brain in gear from now on just in case there is a bit of slime round the corner waiting to be slipped on!

My London visit lived up to my expectations and beyond. It is good to be home though and some serious work has now begun on our Hope Flowers, which Chris prepared beautifully in my absence.

We met a person yesterday who said that she had read our latest blog and had thought that we sounded a bit plaintive. If this is so then I am sorry because we were actually rather enjoying the quiet of April and the lull in the Tumim Prendergast career path for a brief period - I did not mean to come over as plaintive - just mellow.

The lull has ended and we are back into the swing of proposing projects and making applications and responding to invitations to exhibit etc. I find that it is never worth worrying overly about our career path as this is only one small aspect to being an artist and sewing seeds (being proactive and searching for opportunities) usually turns something up. The lulls are important as without them and the slight uncertainty they bring we would either be living on a constant ideas/ adrenalin rush or be horribly complacent.

I am off to London very early tomorrow to visit my mum and go to a family wedding at the weekend. I am so excited about this but also full of guilt as I am leaving Chris to cope alone with a whole week of boys and their activities, the dog and his endless demands while I gallivant around the city having fun, meeting old friends, going to exhibitions, being wined and dined by my mother and then the family wedding which I am really looking forward to as well. I am almost too excited and full of anticipation - it cannot possibly live up to my expectations so I do hope that the next blog entry is not genuinely plaintive after all!

Chris will at least have a whole week off bossy boots Tumim to enjoy. He can wallow in his garden and beaver in the studio without me being the overbearing collaborator I often am - so I will try not to feel too guilty!

I think of April as the years gap - a friend once wrote in a poem. That is very much how this April seems somehow - after a few weeks of the Easter holidays with the weather appearing so balmy, despite there still being a sharp nip in the air.

A new exhibition of collaborative work by Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow is just about to open at the Pier Arts Centre next weekend and so it feels like a fine time to be working three dimensionally - as we are at the moment. They are both in Stromness for the opening and are going to be giving a talk about their work next Saturday which we are looking forward to. Just thinking of these two artists makes me nostalgic for our Falmouth School of Art days - both were so current when we were students, and we shared a house with a sculptress friend who idolised them.

We are currently working on two large wall-relief flowers for a nursery playground in South Ronaldsay (the other end of Orkney). Not having been trained as sculptors or ever having made work for an exterior location before we have taken a fairly safe route and are using marine ply. Once the flowers are adequately prepared we will lace or embroider them with all sorts of threadable materials such as washing line, nylon string, fishing rope etc. The flowers have been designed through the usual Christil Trumpet method - i.e a workshop with a game of flower consequences - in this instance played with 4 year olds.

These eight foot wooden flowers are now sitting propped up against our gable wall. Marine ply is surprisingly lovely to look at with a strong grain running through the wood and so we have chosen to protect them both with a tough, white, micro porous wood stain rather than using opaque paint. This will hopefully give them an elegant and translucent quality over which we can weave.

The next stage is to drill holes in the right places, using the original childrens drawings to keep us on track. Getting to this stage has taken us longer than we had anticipated of course. Chris does night shifts, we have a holiday let to turn around and the boys have a rich and demanding extra -curricular life that sometimes seems impossible to sustain. Getting into the studio usually feels like an achievement all by itself. Our studio adjoins our holiday let - 2 miles up the road from where we live in Stromness. We usually only get in for three days each week at the most - and then of course there is also Fred, the puppy, who can only sit in the boot of the car for so long at a stretch.

There always seem to be countless other demands on our time and we find that having guests holidaying next door with only a couple of fire doors between them and us is also a little off putting. We feel we are intruding and tiptoe around the place, hardly daring to boil the kettle or use the phone - let alone use the saw or hammer! The season has only just got underway but is now in full pelt with hardly a break between bookings until mid September. I am not complaining because this is very good as a source of income for us but is always quite hard to get used to when we have had the house to ourselves for most of the winter.

I read a column in the Guardian by Tracy Emin a few months ago about time running away from her. I showed it to our youngest son Erlend who said - So what? I mean she is famous, she has money, she can choose to write columns, or go to the studio - what a load of rubbish - why does she think she has a right to moan?! We took his point. Chris and I know we are lucky just to be alive, have a family, have a small holiday let business, http://www.stevand.net, have a contracted job, have creative energy and ideas and a studio to work in - but of course if would be even more wonderful to be able to choose to opt out of celebrity status while still having the money that would enable us to be full time artists! I console myself that perhaps Tracy would equally envy us the freedom to explore our ideas and raise a family and walk the dog along the beach without being recognised? Of course Erlend, aged ten and wanting richer, more glamorous parents, a bigger house (for many more pets and computer games) could not be expected to sympathise with Tracy’s plight!

What I am trying to say is that since our show at the Pier Arts Centre we are in a bit of an artistic career lull. We occasionally trawl through the opportunities section of Axis; www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimprendergast but very few suit our location or the fact that we have three sons - the eldest of whom is shortly to take his Standard Grade exams. Our priority is not to disrupt our childrens lives unnecessarily, but our holistic approach to our art practice also means that we are determined not to see this as a negative, and so instead we will just see it as bit of a lull.

There may be lots of opportunities we cannot even consider for practical reasons but this does have the advantage of meaning that we are forced to be resourceful in other ways. We are lucky to have received this nursery commission and feel sure other similar opportunities will keep coming our way as long as we remain proactive. But should no more paid work come our way for a while then we would at least be able to spend time pursuing our Tumim Prendergast thought process - which is presently developing rather excitingly but would benefit from more time in the day. I am not winging though - not a bit!

I really do not like it when people fling quotes about regularly instead of trying to find the right words with which to convey an idea themselves. Those who do this often seem like terrible show -offs, but this quote from Einstein appealed strongly to me and seemed an appropriate way of conveying what I feel about a lot of artistic endeavor. Why attempt to say something oneself badly when Einstein has already said it so coherently eh? That’s what all quoters say though I suspect. I will not be making a habit of quoting I promise!

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimprendergast

Hi - just a quick announcement that Christil Trumpet is now becoming Tumim Prendergast

Christil Trumpet will continue to be the title we use for any educational projects we work on but our principal title will simply comprise of our two surnames.

Another alteration is the title of the painting I described in the last post. The new and final title for this painting is Kicks rather than Mother Consequence. Its far more punchy and apt.

www.axisweb.org/artist/tumimprendergast

Our two shows have been and gone and it is high time for an update. We are currently working full steam on two different commissions for local schools while trying to complete a painting for the John Moores painting prize later this month. The painting is called Mother Consequence and its a very tall, totem-like collection of five canvases. The image has come from one of our consequence collages. The head is a cross-eyed lady with a curling bob, whose torso is half made of a collection of sinister vampire heads taken from a Papdale consequence drawing. The other half is a photo realistic portrayal of an African boy soldier with a bone necklace holding a sawn-off shot gun. The characters legs are spangly and the feet are clad in stunningly high heeled platforms adorned with brightly colored sequins (also painted photo realistically).

Apart from the sheer pleasure of having our new work exhibited for two months in such a prestigious and stunning location as the Pier Arts Centre - now up for another big prize - (see http://www.pierartscentre.com/ - the Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries 2008) we also discovered things we had not previously understood about our work from giving a walk-around artists talk in mid January. We are starting to appreciate more fully that our work is about contemporary culture and family life - for better or for worse. We are artists who enjoy being eclectic and who feel no compulsion to work within the confines of an Orkney tradition which is predominantly landscape. Our work appears shamelessly urban at the moment and refers quite openly to artists such as Banksy,Keith Haring, Lambie, Emin and the Chapmans as well as to popular culture and to living with teenagers.

In our work there is a continual reference to art history and contemporary art practice. Travellers is a very new piece of work that we have created, in part to pay homage to the artists Jim Lambie and Jeff Koons. We feel that this group of highly decorated soft toys represents a search for lost opportunities or lost youth. These soft toys were all found in charity shops, having probably been passed from child to child and discarded. To this extent they seem to us to have acquired nomadic properties and by embroidering and buttoning them we pay tribute to their unknown histories and reinvent them as beautiful objects.

Through watching television, reading the papers and listening to the radio, we, like most people in the Western World, are exposed to gratuitous fly-on-the-wall documentaries and endless news stories. The world just seems to shove itself at us and our senses are frequently bombarded by news of atrocities presented alongside gossip from our celebrity obsessed culture. As artists we try and digest all the contradictory information or speculation we receive daily through the media - wanted or unwanted. We are trying to address the experience of being part of a vast global community from the perspective of living on a small group of islands off Scotland as seen through the eyes of an even smaller unit of five people - our family.

As we have received only positive comments or silence we have tried to guess at what people might have said in criticism of our recent exhibition. An interesting question asked after our talk was about our collaborative approach to painting. I thought the questioner was approving of our ability to work as one but Chris took it as an oblique criticism and thought that this man was suggesting that the work would be more exciting if our individual painting styles, our egos, were more apparent. Our goal is to progress away from an egocentric language, avoiding the big I FEEL SO THEREFORE I AM that many solo artists become preoccupied with. However we do need to think harder about the way we use paint to convey these disparate cultures, the dichotomy of our societys values, and also to celebrate our differences as individuals.

To see some of our recent work please click on link below and look at our artworks on Axis.

www.axisweb.org/artist/christiltrumpet

We will deliver our new work to the Pier Arts Centre today and are both feeling really excited at the prospect of seeing it up on different walls in a gallery space with proper lighting.

A new development in our lives has been that we have recently acquired a puppy called Fred and have been walking him all over Stromness at all hours of the day and night. Not only has this changed our day-to-day routine significantly but it has also altered our family dynamics. Everyone seems happier and lighter for having this black, fluffy scamp around. He makes us laugh with his helter skelter and rewards us all with soppy enthusiasm and a beady black eye. Never having had a dog before I have been amazed by how much I am enjoying having one now. It does mean that embroidering in bed while listening to the radio upstairs as the boys drum, fight , trash the kitchen or slob in front of the tv is not such an option and I do miss this lazy contemplation time, but otherwise he has become our muse and we might even have to consider including a sixth panel/ canvas in each of our family works. To this extent I guess he is a working dog.

Puppy walking around Stromness together in the dark, damp early hours this weekend has meant that we have more time to discuss future projects more fully and we find that we are still on a roll in terms of our creative ideas. We are excited about exploring the the same ideas and are looking forward to developing the techniques and combinations of contrasting materials. This might all change of course when we see the work up on the walls of the Pier Arts Centre and Kirkwall Museum- there is nothing quite so levelling as seeing new work in a different context - but at this moment in time we are both just feeling full of beans. Roll on Fred and life!

“Christil Trumpet is an artistic collaboration formed in 2003 by Stromness artists Christopher Prendergast and Matilda Tumim. Working with childrens artwork is at the heart of Christil Trumpets work. The artists have recently completed a highly successful year long residency based at Papdale Primary School in Kirkwall. The residency aimed to give shape to the creative potential of the schools 500 pupils within the refurbishment and expansion of the schools facilities. The Scottish Arts Councils partners programme and Orkney Islands Council co-funded the partnership between artists and school.

The residency also provided an opportunity for the artistic collaboration of Christil Trumpet to develop their own work more fully. The work in this exhibition finds its roots in this period and continues Christil Trumpets use of childrens art to provide a means to explore lateral connections and the inherent conflict that lies between expression and convention. Further examples of the work of Christil Trumpets residency at Papdale Primary school can be seen at the Orkney Museum, Kirkwall until 21 December.” Carol Dunbar, Education Officer - Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney

Artist statement
Christil Trumpet was formed in 2003 and is an artistic collaborative. Our collaborative title is a shortened anagram made from our two names - Matilda Tumim and Christopher Prendergast.

For us collaboration is a symbiotic process and it is our common intention to provoke thoughts about the nature of beauty and relationships through our art practice. We aim to achieve this through using imagary relating to contemporary issues that in some way, whether directly or indirectly, have made an impact on our own lives. We find that taking a hollistic approach to being artists enables us achieve a great deal. Our most recent work divides into two main themes - family dynamics and contemporary Gods.

In our Gods series each work comprises of five small, square, same-sized canvases which have been formatted into a sphynx-like arrangement. Each God has been derived from a consequence drawing. Through creating our own group of Gods we are attempting to address issues of our time - such as political correctness, health and safely, mental health, predjudice in all its forms, Global Warming and war.

As parents ourselves we are aware of having to continually adapt our behaviour to fit in with Societys expectations of us. This sometimes conflicts with the freedom of expression that we expect to have as artists. It is this conflicting area of self- censorship versus creative independance and the dichotomy between family life and freedom of expression that preoccupies us creatively.

The game of Consequences offers a visual metaphor for this conflict because drawing styles and images are placed side by side in an unpredictable and sometimes unreasonable manner. We are interested in the way that childrens games provide us with the freedom to make lateral connections and enable us to challenge the the accepted order of things. We have chosen to use our own childrens drawings to consider family dynamics. Our children are sometimes reluctant participants in our collaborative art practice, however we continue to plagiarise their drawings and doodles (and expect to pay the price for this sometime in the future).

How do we construct our work?

Almost all of our new work is made in units of five because we are a family of five individuals. Each canvas or embroidery frame represents a family member and we carefully consider the size, colours and layout to create each construction or assemblage. Woven into each of these painted or stitched constructions there is usually is a narrative - but sometimes the story only becomes apparent to us once the painting is complete. We are currently encorporating embroidery, buttons and textiles into our paintings in order to make the picture surface more tactile and complex .

Running parallel to the family and Gods themes are continual references to art history and contemporary art practice. For instance one of our new paintings, Trumpet Bird, has a panel that is covered in buttons. This pays homage to the paintings of Julian Schnabel from the 1980s and also to the more recent constructions and installations of Glaswegian artist, Jim Lambie. We are very interested in the language of art and often use it as a starting point. Sometimes we only discover artists with similar preoccupation’s to our own after we have created work. For example we were recently alerted to the work of the artist Delaine La Bas, whose work was exhibited at the Venice Bienal as part of the Romany Pavilion, by a friend who saw similarities in what this artist is doing to our own work.

We consider ourselves to be both insider and outsider artists. To the extent that we live in a place that is thought to be remote and are preoccupied with subjects that are not often addressed by the mainstream art world, we are outsiders. We are however, wholly aware and interested in current developments and contemporary ideas within the International visual arts community and, in this context, we cannot be considered to be Outsider Artists - but nonetheless enjoy being nonconformists exploring issues to do with conformity.

With Autumn now well on the way (actually we have skipped summer entirely. It just never happened here) it seems to be a good time for an update on developments in our studio.

We have been making leaps forward in our attempts to combine different materials and textures with paint. I completed the Stitch project, The Consequence Family From No.5, earlier this month.

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We have now become so addicted to sewing that we are using it as a form to give our paintings more depth and contrast. As I said in a previous blog our first attempts were a bit sad, but like all good ideas this one has returned unbidden and we are both often to be seen sitting stitching on embroidery hoops side by side in bed in a Yoko and John sort of a way. This probably sounds quite old hat but actually I think we are being quite technically innovative in the way we are using materials and techniques.

We spent a day combing charity shops so that our studio looks like the treasure trove of beads, buttons, threads, thimbles and old clothes. It had a similar look when we worked on our Foul Flora and Weird Waves body of work in 2004 - but the smell is much better this time - those piles of beach bruck stank of rotting seaweed in the studio and made me gag! Our two exhibitions at the Pier Arts Centre in November (23rd) and for the Orkney Museum in December are starting to take shape . Our two main themes of contemporary Gods and of family are central to every thing we do in the studio and the consequence game still provides us with rich fodder and continuity.

Breaking away from the the traditional rectangular format has also been very rewarding and our studio walls are hung in arrangements that may have a random appearance but are actually highly considered. Colour is playing a central role in all our work - we are using it to denote the essence of each member of our painted families and our Gods. I think there is a raw, punky quality to these new works that thrills and alarms us both. Images, fluorescent colours and marks spring up like poetry onto the canvases and must be the outcome of our combined streams of consciousness. Our starting points are the colours, doodles and drawings made by us and our kids - but beyond that we are just letting our instincts dictate what we do.