From the crumbling brick nooks to the miles of cables on rusty girders, The Old Shoe Factory a.k.a. St Mary’s Works is a building that impresses at every scale. I love the electrical power box where thick black cables converge. It’s a building that inspires and a fabulous space to create in.
I was delighted to return to this disused factory with fellow Lonely Arts Club artists and enjoy a week of project work towards our June exhibition RESONANCE. I benefitted from getting a sense of the venue, realising its strengths and limitations. Too much ambient light thwarted my initial ideas about projecting my Cyberpunk films and digital collages. So I’m thinking a lot more about found object art, drawing and small scale vignettes.
My project is called Cyberpunk 2.1 and I’m exploring digital footprints; the hardware legacy of broken phones, circuit boards and components that is the detritus of our digital world-building. This exploration is integral to my Cyberpunk fiction Flashboy Max. I’m creating imagery to illustrate the story and expand that particular dystopian vision of real world and the Game World.
It was great to catch up with fellow artists and members of the Lonely Arts Club at our first in-person meeting since 2019. We’re preparing for RESONANCE, an exhibition in June at St Mary’s Works which promises to be ambitious and exciting!
Natalie Knowles 