Michelle Cotton

75 years after the first photocopy was made, firstsite’s autumn exhibition celebrated the role that this technology has played within contemporary art. Featuring over 125 works by 39 artists and artist groups from 10 countries, it is our largest exhibition to date. On the 22nd of October 1938 in the Astoria district of Queens, New York, Chester Carlson and his assistant Otto Kornei succeeded in making the first photocopy, a xerographic image of the date and their location. Carlson – a patent attorney whose years of research and somewhat hazardous home experimentation had been inspired by the pain and tedium of copying legal texts – spent the next two decades working to develop the first photocopy machine. The first commercial, manually operated photocopier, Xerox Model A, was introduced the following year and the Xerox 914, the first fully automated copier, followed ten years later in 1959. The process invented by Carlson, known as ‘xerography’, is still used in most photocopying machines today. This major international and historical survey encompasses photography, sculpture, video and works on paper installed across the galleries at firstsite. It includes some of the earliest examples of artists using the photocopier in ‘copy art’, ‘mail art’ and conceptual projects from the 1960s and 70s.… (mer)

In 1954 artists Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi formed a creative partnership under the company name of Hammer Prints Limited. Over the course of the next seven years, the two artists established a commercial venture, collaboratively designing patterns and working with industry specialists to produce wallpapers, fabrics, ceramic tiles, furniture and tableware using their designs.

This new book is published by firstsite on the occasion of the exhibition Nigel Henderson & Eduardo Paolozzi: Hammer Prints Limited (8 December 2012 – 3 March 2013). Based on original research, the exhibition charts the history of Hammer Prints within the context of their broader artistic output and other collaborations such as the exhibitions, Parallel of Life and Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1953) and This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956).

The publication documents original exhibition research, features contributions from leading experts including firstsite curator Michelle Cotton, Eduardo Paolozzi’s biographer Robin Spencer, design historian Lesley Jackson, and includes full colour reproductions of the Hammer designs and artwork alongside hitherto unseen working material.

The exhibition, held at Firstsite in Colchester, explored the history and legacy of Hammer Prints Ltd, a venture established by Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson in 1954 as a vehicle for their self-declared 'attack on the craft field using the silk-screen as the media to be exploited.' Working in partnership, the artists created a series of designs which were applied to textiles, wallpapers, ceramics and homewares.

We worked directly with artwork acetates1 and archival materials to restore and reproduce the patterns for the exhibition, in their original colours and at their original scale. Taking Firstsite’s expansive walls as a blank canvas, we reproduced the original wallpapers to cover the walls of the gallery entrance. For the main curved wall of the building, Henderson & Paolozzi’s own experiments with magnification and enlargements were echoed in a series of graphic cutouts from their Sea Beasts series,2 which drew visitors through the building to the galleries themselves.

https://apracticeforeverydaylife.com/projects/nigel-henderson-eduardo-paolozzi-h...… (mer)