An Absent Howl by Graeme Armstrong

About

Greyswood Art + Design was set up in 2016 by Julia and Graeme Armstrong as a vehicle for Graeme’s creativity – which had remained dormant for most of the previous 30 years! This was reawakened by studying graphic design at ual: Chelsea – and he is now a full-time artist. His main body of work combines a graphic style with photographic source material to produce digital art prints – but he has also been known to lift a paint brush occasionally, and several one-off multi-media pieces also feature in the collection shown here.

Graeme’s art examines many themes. It looks at our place in nature, and the beauty and inevitability of decay – and considers our increasingly antagonistic relationship with our environment. His more recent work explores ideas around memory and identity – and how we are all our own construct, creating our own personal narrative through our memories and imagination.

The cornerHOUSE exhibition is the culmination of a busy year in which Graeme has gradually abandoned his attempts to produce art purely for commercial reasons – focussing instead on making work that is both interesting and creatively satisfying to him, sometimes with abrasive and challenging results. Following his exhibition at Sprout Arts earlier this year, one considerate commentator noted: “There is an awful lot of nice, polite art out there and you are neither! Yet you are capable of making something beautiful out of nothing – or even something otherwise repellent.  I don't like all of it but even the ones I don't like still make you think.”

“An Absent Howl” features a series of new pieces that deal with issues of absence and departure. Many of them are a response to a recent decision to leave the metropolitan bubble of Southwest London and head back to The North…