projects

A project started while I was researching my BA thesis on the Concrete/visual poetry movement. My grandfather Ken Cox was a member of the Gloucestershire group (GLOUP) of Concrete Poets, making innovative kinetic sculptures and images using letterforms during the 1960s. I was drawn to respond to their unique experiments with word and image, making prints, drawings and woodcarvings. I enjoy getting lost in this enigmatic era of rustic, modernist, maximal and minimal artistic behaviour.

A collaboration with Ross Sanders while studying at Falmouth. 'Cornish Hedge' was strange effort to learn fiercely regional land skills, and provoke conversations about hedges (of which there are around 30,000 miles in Cornwall) by making 3 tonnes of useless hedge in the middle of the 70s era Falmouth studios. Hedge building is a craft with a rich heritage in Cornwall, and, over hundreds of years, has created a hugely important network of ecosystems in the pastoral landscape. We drew critique from both hedging and sculpture perspectives - interesting sculpture, bad hedge, bad sculpture, bad hedge.

A place specific printmaking project, using takuhon printing to record the stone and wooden inscriptions embedded in the landscapes of Cornwall and Gloucestershire. The project began by learning takuhon, a 2,000 year old Chinese print craft which produces a sculptural paper cast/relief print. They are something like a 3D frottage. Looking for carved marks in hedges and woods over 3 months, I spent the springtime shaping paper, drying it, waiting and printing. The project records a culture of rural graffiti and inscription, particularly in tree bark, copying insult, instruction and romance in graphic form. These moments of wayside strangeness became an installation of prints shown at Falmouth graduation show.

Audio field recording project around Falmouth, based on ideas of soundscape ecology. Familiarising myself with Southern Cornwall was soundtracked by the noise and silence of dockyards, workshops, quarries, mills, bogs, saltmarshes, and sea caves. Montaging these recordings onto reel to reel tape, I wanted to see how listening back to this droning, whirring, squelching noise (normally a sensory background) could stimulate images or narrative, holding listening sessions and gathering written responses.

Available at https://charlie-ash.bandcamp.com/album/salt-burn

This work's starting point was the horticultural practice of grafting varieties of fruit tree together to make varieties which are often unique to village orchards; and named by generations of cider makers/drinkers. A long scroll of names of heritage Gloucestershire fruit was printed with woodblock letters, spliced in half and installed to spin on turned rollers and cranks. The viewer is invited to collage and graft the next village varieties.

A woodcut project in response to the 1960 film 'With These Hands: The Rebirth of the American Craftsman'. The film follows woodworkers, ceramicists, weavers, metalworkers and glass artists who are floating/struggling through a craft revival dream in rural America. Each print in the series of twelve transcribes a still image from the film, digested in stages of watching, drawing, carving blocks, printing and arranging. I enjoy how this process digs into the material of the film imagery, and absorbs a strange mix of nostalgia and murky otherworldliness which seems to run through media from the craft revival era.

During a 2023 residency at De Rode Schuur, Noordwijk (NL), I explored how printmaking connected with practicing green wood crafts. This was inspired by the history of 'bodging' in my home woods of the cotswolds, and a revival in land skills/crafts among my generation. I took a DIY pole lathe over to Holland, set it up in the garden of the art space with poles of pollard willow, and started to research and make barens (burnishing tools) from sycamore which had been felled in Noordwijk. These barens were used for lino workshops with school groups at the art space, and tested out by printing new large scale woodcuts in the print studio. From there I experimented with a range of practical and imaginative exchanges which developed between processing wood and image making.