Ed Compson

Ed Compson (b. London, 1991) is an artist, activist and programmer. He has spent lockdown in his childhood home searching for nodes of physical warmth from community, intimacy and hope amongst the barren and stilted zoomscape of online art school.

Ed was in quite a few group shows before all this: The Weird and the Eerie , Hockney Gallery, London (2020), Sympathetic Magic , ZONA MISTA, London (2019), Sensitive Matter, Bridget Riley Studios, London (2019), BLIP, Edinburgh Annuale, Edinburgh (2019) and Sextant, Middlesex Gallery, London (2019).

He likes artist-run projects and was a committee member of EMBASSY Gallery from 2016-2018, helping organise Annuale 2017, Nata de Coco, Fractal Paisleys, The Plaza and Simply Beaming. He is also co-director of Maruseppu Art Residency and School (M.A.R.S), an art complex and school in Hokkaido, Japan.

He recently started a petition about this platform you are on now, helped form the RCA Action Group and Pause or Pay UK and was on the news asking the RCA to be more empathetic. Due to this, and the issues laid out by the action group (letter in sidebar), Ed has no faith in the RCA's Senior Management Team, headed by Paul Thompson and Naren Barfield, and supports the no-confidence motion in their leadership.

Contact

Degree Details

Painting (MA)

Through the use of painterly stuff, a DIY laser bed or the twine of a kite, my practice is a personal search for humanness, intimacy and community within omnipotent digital, political and institutional structures.

While this has usually manifested itself within the surface of a canvas, the lockdown has presented new anxieties to contend with and triggered a search for material outputs and collaborative platforms that better reflect my personal psychopathology.

I have been feeling groundless due to a separation from both my support networks and studio process as well as the daily attempt to communicate with an unsympathetic and inflexible monolith that is the Royal College of Art.

In a desire to reorientate to this newfound reality, I've been making paintings on perforated grip mats, tracing clouds and building and flying box kites.

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I’ve used this virtual space to present my physical, airbound, open-call, collaborative project a fish you have already caught , and extend an invitation to you, virtual surfer, to help me launch it skywards over the next couple of weeks.

What follows is also; a visual log of the past three months with my parents and etching device, a directory of all the people who have contributed to the kites and a small showcase of selected paintings.

kite eight, kite four, kite seven, kite five, kite six (left to right)

kite four test flight 06/07/20 — Assistance from Helen and Jon Compson

a fish you have already caught is an airbound platform that is attempting to take off during RCA 2020.

The platform is currently made up of 8 box kites etched with the drawings and images sent to Ed during lockdown by fellow students, strangers, tutors, dating app matches and his grandma.

Both you and regular park dwellers are invited to help him launch this network by flying kites with him during the run of the virtual show.

The opening (July 16th) will present the painting department, friends and family a chance to meet and fly kites.

Location: Battersea Park, South of Central Avenue
google pin: https://goo.gl/maps/3nv8S9aFWhEHHpZG9

Dates and times: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-fish-you-have-already-caught-tickets-112761422450

Weather Dependant / Dates may change (keep an eye on the sky and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a_fish_you_have_already_caught/ )

Hand Sanitiser will be provided and social distancing will be observed.

Medium: Plywood, twine and laser etching on paper

Size: 30 x 30 x 90 cm

In Collaboration with:

Event link

Trace of Q.L. and a representation of the web of elementary grains of space, 2019, Oil and Laser Etching on Board, 23 x 28 cm

Francesca, 2019, Oil and Laser Etching on Canvas, 23 x 28 cm

Cellular Automata, 2019, oil and laser etching on canvas, 70 x 80 cm

Rend, 2019, oil and laser etching on canvas, 35 x 35cm

Siege of Bristol (September 3rd, 1645, Oil and Laser Etching on Canvas, 23 x 28 cm

Microbe af Klint, Gesso and Laser Etching on Canvas, 23 x 28 cm

‘In order to leave a trace, it is necessary for something to become arrested, to stop moving, and this can happen only in an irreversible process - that is to say, by degrading energy into heat. In this way, computers heat up, the brain heats up, the meteors that fall into the moon heat it; even the goose quill of a medieval scribe in a Benedictine abbey heats a little the page on which he writes. In a world without heat, everything would rebound elastically, leaving no trace.’ - Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time

A Dialogue Betwixt a horse of warre and a mill-horse, Laser etching and Oil on Grip Mat 80 x 120 cm 2020

the wheelbarrow pushes the man, Laser etching and Oil on Grip Mat 80 x 120 cm 2020

Medium: Oil and laser etching on PVC grip mat

Size: 80 x 120 cm

parasympathetic system, Oil and Laser Etching on Canvas, 70 x 90 cm, 2020

enteric system , Oil and Laser Etching on Canvas, 70 x 90 cm, 2020

sympathetic system , Oil and Laser Etching on Canvas, 70 x 90 cm, 2020

Painting is intimate: It is an involuntary or unconscious method of communication. It produces a bodily response, both in its production in a studio, and its intimate encounter and reception within a space where the sensuousness of painterly matter results in ostensibly soulful, desired but easily marketable objects.

Painting is mechanical: It is often a technical, premeditated, application and removal of matter. It is also technical in its distribution through networks and often is found now in a digital black mirror limbo of contemporary online spaces, galleries, archives, and collections.

For me, paintings act as metaphysical magic-eyes that flicker between a diagrammatic mapping of a completed process, and an immediate, often sensuous, phenomenological effect of their current, material reality.

the autonomic system triptych is in some way trying to think through all this. Attempting to create part mechanical and part sensuous works that invoke both body and machine in their process and realization.

I have taken the diagrams of the autonomic nervous system, distorted them through a digitized and mechanical network and laser-etched them into thick oil paint.

The autonomic nervous system regulates a variety of body processes that takes place without conscious effort. The system is made of three parts, the parasympathetic, the sympathetic and the enteric. They are responsible for regulating involuntary body functions, such as heartbeat, blood flow, breathing and sexual arousal.

Medium: oil and laser etching on linen

Size: 70 x 90 cm

laser bed picture plane

two key workers — Helen and Jon Compson

Launch Project

'a kite is a victim' — Leonard Cohen - 1961

19/04/20

I am sitting in my bedroom, wearing green safety goggles next to a CoolTouch Mattress and a bedframe propped up vertically against the wall. On the floor, in its pre lockdown spot, lies a rudimentary 1.2 x 1.2m DIY laser etching device emitting a sharp marine-blue beam. There is a strong smell of burnt linen rising from the reproduction and ghostly traces of family, friends and stranger’s drawings, images and signs... (text continues in link)

Medium: Plywood, twine and laser etching on linen

Size: 30 x 30 x 90 cm

In Collaboration with: