Resonance FM Blog

From Bagrec’s blog for February 5th regarding Paul Burwell who died recently, and who had the distinction of being LMC member number 1:

“I owned an artwork by him, it consisted of a magazine under glass. The magazine had been eaten away by maggots- a readymade of sorts, the maggots had created a weird collage where text and images appeared depending on how far the maggots had eaten into it. It got knocked off my wall and the magazine completely disintegrated. I never met him properly but seemed like a totally decent bloke”.

A few years ago, Resonance had a fund-raising auction to which I contributed the Paul Burwell collage referred to in his blog by Richard Sanderson who obviously was the winning bidder. The artwork in question was a magazine upon which slugs had settled and digested most of the text and images of the journal, the title of which had therefore become impossible to decipher. The effect was similar to those degraded billboard posters turned into Art in the 1960s but this was different in that it had been created by living creatures. The magazine held together, just, and had been mounted simply with glass and backboard and signed in black felt pen ‘Paul Burwell’.

I first encountered Paul at the Filmmakers’ Co-op on Gloucester Avenue one afternoon when he and filmmaker Annabel Nicolson were manoeuvring a large screen around the cinema space whilst having a difference of opinion about something else…

Cut to 1993 or thereabouts: ‘workfortheeyetodo’ gallery off Brick Lane; Simon Cutts’ space for artists’ books where Paul is setting up a retrospective exhibition including the framed magazine half-eaten by slugs which I buy along with a collage made in collaboration with Bob Cobbing, which I still have, comprising of four A4 sheets of paper with sticky backs intended to be arranged on a wall randomly; vague, sepia, photocopied images of Tower Bridge, a large letter C and the silhouette of a tube train…
At the same show I bought several vinyl singles, each one hand painted with the word Disc on one side and Cover on the other, a raw thumping track with Anne Bean singing or rather growling “it’s a low flying aircraft… it’s a warning… evacuate immediately!”