I spent the best part of the beginning of the month refining ‘woolgathering’ and intermittently thinking it was finished and that I needed to do more to it. By the end of the month it looked like this, but I’ve decided I need to add another scene and I’ve refined the transitions. Then I move on to the Tickhill Road Drawings.
Acrobats August 4th 2025
I made this drawing after I’d completed the acrobat sculpture and then realised I didn’t really need it for the whole set up.
After about ten days of faffing about I looked out some old sketchbooks to begin a new project.
Tickhill Road Garden sketchbook
These sketches were made around late 2018 early 2019.
Tickhill Road Drawings
Tickhill Road drawings process
Tickhill Road drawings process
They’re all of the Tickhill Road garden and are worked in pairs. The very loose first drawing is mono printed to the other sheet of paper and then both are pinned to the wall to work in tandem.
TR_28/02/2019_[25/08/2025]_one
TR_28/02/2019_[25/08/2025]_two
The pair literally reflect each other but also complement each other but the main reason for mono printing is for the quality it gives to the mark on the paper. In most of these the pair are one on cartridge paper and one, slightly smaller on watercolour paper.
TR_28/02/2019_[25/08/2025]_three
TR_28/02/2019_[25/08/2025]_four
The next phase of this project is to transform some of the Tickhill Road drawings into 3d to recreate the garden on as close to full scale as possible. I’ve started some maquettes without much success.
TR_05/12/18_3dVariation_[27/08/2025]
As well as the sculptures being at this stage difficult to realise some of the drawings are very loose.
TR_05/12/18_[20/08/25]_one
TR_05/12/18_[20/08/25]_two
TR_05/12/18_variationone_[27/08/25]
So this months post is late and less precise than I would like because I’m in that in between state waiting for a project to coalesce. In addition to the earlier sketches in the gif above I’m looking at a sketchbook I made of the two trees at the bus stop near my house.
Drawing
I’ve continued to draw every day;
The August drawings can be seen here
Draw Every Day – August 25
Draw Every Day - August 25
Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 23 on 15th August and ...
“That property in land and liberty among men, in a state of nature, ought to be equal, few, one would fain hope, would be foolish enough to deny. Therefore, taking this to be granted, the country of any people, in a native state, is properly their common, in which each of them has an equal property, with free liberty to sustain himself and connections with the animals, fruits and other products thereof.“
All of the work I’ve been doing over the last few years has drawn me towards questions around the nature of property and possession of land in all of its aspects. There is a strong case to be made for the nature of our relationship with land to have been formed through the application of the Inclosure Act of 1773 and the establishment development of Landscape Gardening that created the bucolic ideal we reference in our current defences of the naturalness of vistas that are entirely man made.
Somehow this thinking has led me to make a series of works that culminate in a way that I can only explain by outlining the process and identifying the influences that are inevitably applied at different stages of making.
You should always look down on a circus (maquettes)
In 2002 or 2003 I made a set of small maquettes, like these that I reproduced in 2021 but that might have looked a bit more like these.
Sketchbook pages from 2002/2003
From these wax maquettes I made two drawings, first this one
You should always look down a circus (drawing 2003)
And then this one
you should always look down on a circus (spaced)
I made these on Fabriano Accademia 200gsm Cartridge Paper, stretched to a big drawing board leaning against the sideboard in my living room. Which says nothing other than that we can’t always have easels or afford studios.
Moving on, life intervenes, work gets intense, other drawings inveigle themselves into your consciousness and drag you off with their peculiar indulgences. But at the back of your mind you know that this moment of oddness is part of something that hasn’t surfaced yet.
In March 2020 I managed to move my kit out of the empty shop just before the Announcement.
Waste Ground
The following month I decided to clear and plant a patch of waste ground that I thought was unadopted rather than anyone’s property, at the back of the garden and that was where the next project began.
Patch dug over
This is the point where I started to think more deeply about my relationship with property and the notion of ownership of the natural world.
This first began to manifest itself through drawings
Balby Garden, April 2020
Made on site initially and developed in sketchbooks and small maquettes…
casting stones
Balby Garden Sculpture June 2020
I made a series of Garden Sculptures using casts from stones found in my pseudo allotment and using gold leaf and oil paints.
The quotations used as titles for the pieces are mostly from TS Eliot apart from “Fiction is not imagination” which is from Baudrillard’s ‘America’.
I had become concerned with the translation of sources from one media to another with the geranium project (the ACE Project) and it continues to be at the core of the work I do. Translation might not be the most precise word to use but addresses the primary motivation for the activity I engage in. The way I express myself is through the objects and drawings I make and they carry all the varieties of conversation, discourse, polemic, broadside, joking etc.,
One year later, March 2021, I dreamt about the circus drawings and then made a whole series of new drawings and new, simpler, maquettes.
You should always look down on a circus remade
New Circus Maquettes
These figures related to the garden sculptures and to the forms I was seeing in the garden, and imagining into the virtual space.
I gradually began to merge the figures into new sets of drawings. I should indicate here that I work on sets of drawings simultaneously and carry marks and textures and colours and patterns across the set as it evolves. The process involves copying, mono-printing, overlaying and waiting for surfaces to dry and can involve collage, usually of the drawings themselves as I search for the form to emerge.
Circus Drawings 2 of 4
I spent the next year working on a series based around tori (toruses) that is currently sitting in abeyance.
C-View Studio 2023
In May 2023 I moved into my studio at C-View.
Red Garden Three 2023
In October I returned to the garden to start working on the Red Garden Series of drawings and sculptures.
Three Trees, Red Gardens, in progress
These figures were based on forms of trees in the garden and the strangeness of the red films.
I spent several moths working on iterations of these sculptures using anything I had to hand.
Three Trees Half Size
Dancing Partners
Studio 30/05/2024
Having the space in the studio was what enabled me to build out into the garden, does that make sense? Perhaps it should be to build in from the garden.
All the time transferring these objects into the VR environment by scanning into Poly.cam and importing those objects into Blender, then to Unity.
Studio 03/07/24
Towards the end of the year I started to extend the world of the garden in VR and decided I needed to be able to play with scale in the developing environment. I had at this point been led to read much more about enclosure and how tied in to British Politics it was in the 17th Century alongside the development of landscape gardens and the engineering of what we now regard as the countryside.
Flowerbed October 2024
The flowerbed drawings and sculptures came along at this point.
Flowerbed Sculpture 2024
You Should Always Look down on a Circus 2025
The sculptures from 2003 have been made at full size now and the VR world is all there, although there are still some refinements to do including sound issues and perhaps the start position.
Drawing
I’ve continued to draw every day;
The July drawings can be seen here
Draw Every Day – July 25
Draw Every Day - July 25
Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 22 on 16th July and ...
There is a way in which applying for funding sucks the life out of you and makes you perceive your practice as lacking any kind of progress. A lot of applications, anything in ACE projects or DYCP and most other that arrive without fanfare require a well defined project that hasn’t been started yet and won’t be started until the grant is approved. The problem with this is that you spend so much time waiting for the decision, I know you how long you’re going to wait and I know everyone writes that they follow the rules but nobody does, that you can’t summon the energy to do anything once you’ve been declined. Needless to say I didn’t get mu grant funding! Sigh!
The only thing to do is carry on regardless. I’m also getting a bit pissed off with funding providers who will only comment through social media channels. I don’t won’t to be on LinkedIn anymore, I really can’t be arsed with Facebook and obviously I ditched twitter years ago (feels like it anyway). Why they can’t put their posts on a blog on their websites is clearly so technical it is beyond my ken.
Anyway this last two months have been about applying for funding and reaching a point where I couldn’t progress while I awaited an outcome and the subsequent come down. Hence the quicksand, I was already slowing down but the rejection sent me stuttering to a halt. Then there has been the prep for an open studio event next week.
scene notes
At the beginning of the month I had a lot of notes like this one in my notebooks, this one a scene list for woolgathering.
Horse and Fox
Fox
And I decided to build a fox, and then a horse based on the Uffington white horse.
White Horse
Stress Free Living
After painting both and spending a lot too much time working on animating the fox model I realised I needed to build an articulated version of the fox to make the animation easier.
Articulated Fox
In the end I split the body to make the spine articulate.
Fox Drawing
Then made a drawing from the fox model. That will resolve into the scene below.
Fox in the Moonlight
Articulated Fox
I found I would need to build the fox out of something stronger to enable it to stand unaided and for me to change the position.
The current state of “Woolgathering” is in these two videos, the second one reduced to five minutes for a competition entry.
The rest of time has been spent framing and hanging small paintings in the studio for the open weekend coming up. The hackwork is always like trudging through quicksand and gives surprisingly few rewards when looking at the slightly older work.
Peppers and Fruit
Primrose, woodland plants, leBrun bather, Dunnock
Small Foxes, Apples, Candles, Interior and Glassware
Prints from large drawings
woodland, pigeons and sparrow, still life.
Drawing
I’ve continued to draw every day;
The February drawings can be seen here
Draw Every Day – February 25
Draw Every Day - February 25
Continuing to draw every day in Fabriano artist's Journal with ...
Draw Every Day - January 25
Continuing to draw every day in Fabriano artist's Journal with coloured pages. On the 25th December I received a set of coloured brush pens from my wife and have used them since.
The drawings are made any time from 9:00 am at the breakfast table and occasionally later in the day if I'm away from home.
The drawings have been posted since the beginning, 6th May 2020, on instagram https://www.instagram.com/latham_1959
You can see previous months through the galleries page https://www.ian-latham.com/blog/galleries
or you can go straight to December's drawings here -
Draw Every Day – December 24
Draw Every Day - December 24
Continuing to draw every day, i completed book 20 on the 7th ...
Draw Every Day – August 25Draw Every Day - August 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 23 on 15th August and ...See photo »
Draw Every Day – July 25Draw Every Day - July 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 22 on 16th July and ...See photo »
