Riverbed Stories at Creekside Discovery Centre, Deptford X (c) Mandy Williams 2014
September was a busy and interesting month. One of the highlights was visiting Ireland for the first time to attend the Kinsale Arts Festival where I had three photographs in the Now Wakes the Sea exhibition. I enjoyed seeing the other work in the show by artists Collette Egan, Elizabeth Lyne, Joan Sugre, Laura Smith, Luke Sisk, Miriam O’Connor, Rita O’Driscoll and Sean Guinan, as well as visiting separate exhibitions by Kathy Prendegast and Daphne Wright.
Riverbed Stories (c) Mandy Williams; in foreground Installation (c) Luke Sisk in Now Wakes the Sea exhibition
As soon as I was back two other exhibitions were installed - one at Seven Dials in Covent Garden and one at the Creekside Discovery Centre in Deptford for the Deptford X festival.
The Covent Garden exhibition, sea (e) scape, has been organised by Balthazart and features photography by myself and Elisabeth Blanchet. I'm pleased to be showing work from two different series, Frame and Immerse. The show opens 1 October and runs through to the end of November, there will be a private view in early November.
The Deptford X exhibition runs over two weekends, finishing on Sunday 5 October. I'm showing seven large-scale weatherproof prints from Riverbed Stories which have been printed up by Concorde Graphics and installed on the large exterior creekside wall. The Creekside Discovery Centre is the perfect place to show this work - all credit to Festival Director Caz Underwood for her management of this project. There are many different arts activities happening throughout Deptford - pleased to have seen a few of these on the festival launch night, particularly liked work by artists Nicola Rae and Victoria Rance.
Also in late September, the National Open Art exhibition opened at Somerset House, London. I went along to the artists' preview evening which was really enjoyable. 122 works were on show from an original submission of around 3500. Many prizes were awarded during the evening.
Riverbed Stories on display at Somerset House (c) Mandy Williams
As Riverbed Stories has been featured in different exhibitions this Autumn, I thought it would be a good time to self-publish a book of a selection of these images. 23 photographs are included in the publication - a full preview can be seen here.
Finally, I was very happy to be invited to be a guest artist for this year's Photomonth. I'll write more about this next month when the work will be on display in Shoreditch.