image copyright of Ursula Hansen (2024)
About
Mike Connor
by Janie Trollope
I was more than happy to collaborate with Mike on Glass Ghost and, reading his piece on my art, where he was initially drawn in by my Tortured Man depiction, with its need for life through a title, for me it was an affinity borne of my viewing, before we knew one another, of his Flush project – stark black and white images of public toilets and all things concerning public toilets. He takes us to appraise in detail a place where we don’t generally linger. Flush is also acommercial. Who would buy these? I love that this is insight and creativity, but has nothing to do with commerce, which can drive the best of us to make the wrong decisions for our art.
After we met, I posed for Mike’s White Dress collection, allowing my snowy dress to become stained with paint. That was a cathatric experience and the images are on my wall. I encouraged the inclusion of some of the White Dress project here, despite its possible dissonance with modern gender politics. If you object, blame me! Through The Cake Hole is colourful and playful, and other of Mike’s projects test and tease the reliance of image on text, or text on image, and even arrive, I intuit, at those compatriots’ breaking point.
Self Portrait: I keep birds. They sing to me whilest I work.
About
Janie Trollope
by Mike Connor
A former water-colour artist, Janie has turned at this point in her successful career to digital imagery. There are four bodies of her work represented on Glass Ghost.
Yikes uses a minimum of strokes, eschewing colour, to convey an idea or thought or emotion. These images often require a title to give that spike of meaning to their otherwise deliberately sparse and even simplistic surfaces. For example, a sense of foreboding only presents itself when we look at the few lines representing a spead-eagled man – the most basic of Janie’s illustrations – once we are told by the title that he awaits the return of his torturer. The tension between image and language, the weight of either in making a successful depiction, was the factor which initially drew me to Janie as an artist. It mirrors my own concerns in Do You Take This Woman, where I study the same balance, although in my case, it’s explored through the cojoining of photography and text.
Janie’s next project was Plus 1, where a single colour is added to an image to explore that colour’s contribution to the otherwise still minimal lines. Also represented here are more recent images, and finally some images from her Bicker By God project, where the verbal phrases and insults we throw at one another in a domestic setting are splattered in strange and spikey text upon the canvas, making an interesting, minimalist and coherent collection.