HISTORY



2016-2017



NOËL LIMITS II



"The skullfest"



THE RETURN OF CHRISTMAS SHOPPING FOR STROPPY PEOPLE



Featuring:

​
BEER dirt, dirt, Christmas-bulk-buy-sad-pretending-it's-for-a party-not-for-boxing-day-alone cheap

PRINTS by Fisters and friends-of-fist including:

Gareth Berwyn, Rollina Blok, Paul Dewis
Marc Hulson, Ryan McClelland, Esther Planas, Alex Schady, Jonathan Trayner, Work 'Aus

BOOKS & COMICS by 24hrs in the Sky artists and new Fist Laura Nicholson

THE LAUNCH of 'The Blue Plague Print School Linocut Textbook' by Lisa Cradduck- featuring limited edition hand printed dust-jacket

LIVE MUSIC by some incarnation of house band English Heretic, who will be playing new wave bastardisations of Christmas carols so that we will never sleep again.

And misanthropic mood music





POST
PRODUCTION
BLUES



Private views-
Thursday 28th September 6 - 9pm
Saturday 30th September 6 - 9pm

Mutton Fist Press are pleased to announce the opening of ‘Post Production Blues’, a collection of new work by Ryan McClelland. The exhibition comprises of a group of recent works that reveal the broad technical scope of Ryan’s practice; wood block prints, ceramics and a patch-work wall hanging.

Moving away from his narrative driven earlier work, Ryan has produced an installation within the print studio that is an exploration of the notion and nature of art-making. Employing poor quality materials and amateurish/hobbyist aesthetics (that obfuscate his considerable technical abilities), Ryan considers current roles and receptions of labour and craft. The work celebrates the artist’s experience of intimacy within art production, and questions hierarchies of worth and value in modes of art production and consumption.





ENGLISH HERETIC are back in residence !

For this occupation, the Heretics are folding time and piercing it. The peasant revolt of 1381 and the summer of love 1967 will clash and burn in unstable pigments and dis-chords. We aim to excite and incite.

In support, RYAN JORDAN will be hacking our respriratory systems with pulses of dark and light.


COME HERE.... GO THERE


A P.I. EVENT HOSTED MY MUTTON FIST PRESS & FIVE YEARS



PI 10: Come Here...Go There



Launch event: 15/07/17 6-9pm
Press release:



PI presents a podcast and launch event hosted by Five Years and Mutton Fist Press.


This latest iteration of the roaming arts organisation aims to essay on ideas surrounding the act of wandering, articulated through narrative, song, sound enquiry and monologue.


Wandering suggests an element of passivity, a simple observational amble perhaps...


The artists participating in this project demonstrate approaches to the subject that are more complicated, political, humorous, thoughtful, melancholic, self-examining, useful and nuanced than passive.


The podcast and launch will be framed by a narrative monologue, four chapters in length and written by Jamie Dyson. The invited artists have been asked to use these chapters as a starting point to build their own ideas from.


LOOSE BAKER, PHILL WILSON-PERKIN, SAM TAYLOR, AE HUTCH, MIEZARUTE (ADAM SMITH & KEIKO TAKAHASHI), GEORGINA WESLEY, MARK SIEBERT, HANNAH DARGAVEL- LEAFE, LISA CRADDUCK, GARETH BERWYN, JAMIE DYSON.​





EXCORCISM IN STYLE



Press release:

Friday 21st April,

18.00-21.00



English Heretic is a long-term, collaborative, creative project, helmed by renegade polymath Andy Sharp. Incarnate as esoteric and outré music, writing and events, English Heretic is a psycho-geographer with a bloody shovel. A Paranoiac Critical Theorist with a scary laugh.


‘Exorcism In Style’ is Mutton Fist Press scuffing away our salt-circle and letting English Heretic take possession.




The event will include a live performance by English Heretic personnel, a retrospective of original English Heretic sleeve art, and the debut of a new, hand in glove linoprint by all three Mutton Fist Press founding members: a trisected and reassembled mangling of an English Heretic collage. English Heretic has also produced a limited-edition CD of re-worked tracks from their back catalogue for the event, twenty-four of which are encased in hand-printed, linocut sleeves. Limited edition prints, recordings and other Heretical ephemera will be available to purchase at the event.


HERETICS: Andy Sharp, Dean Brannigan, Ian Taylor.


FISTERS: Gareth Berwyn, Lisa Cradduck, Adam Piper.






WINDOW FACE



CARLTON'S BIG DADDY



VOLATILE SPIRITS



The Carlton Tavern, Kilburn was demolished in April of 2015 by it’s owner, without permission from the local council, or the knowledge of it’s Landlady. It was razed to make way for luxury flats, amid rising house prices, and rising tension.


‘The Carlton Tavern Golems’ are cobbled together from the remnants and rubble of the pub. They are Arcimboldo assemblages. Bricolage with bricks etched in zinc and lino. Bruised brutes with ornate coving shoulder blades, bar stool thighs and ashtray tits. Hovering menacingly above the gutted tavern or looming out of darkness. They stand to represent the dissent and the latent collective power of the pub’s patrons, as fantasy manifestations of supernatural resistance to social cleansing.




CARLTON'S BIG DADDY SKELETON



WINDOW FACE SKELETON



WINDOW FACE & BIG DADDY HANG



GRRRRRRR



HENCH & CLENCH HANG



CARLTON PHANTOM



CARLTON PHANTOM (DETAIL)



CRACKED OPTICS



PRESS RELEASE (detail)





NOËL LIMITS



"Christmas Shopping for Stroppy People"



NOËL LIMITS
DROLLERIES



A suite of semi-seasonal marginalia, in lino cut and unlimited edition, by WORK'AUS A.K.A. Lisa Cradduck.





24 HOURS IN THE SKY
TAKE OVER
MUTTON FIST



17/11/2016





KNOCK, KNOCK

PHILL WILSON-PERKIN


Recorded in the Swedenborg House in London in 2014, Knock Knock presents audio of Phill Wilson-Perkin knocking on every door of the building. The un-rhytmical metre of the knocking is set by the artist's own pace as he walks from door to door. Knock Knock is made after Manos Tsngaris' Pfahle, 1981, in which Tsangaris followed the route of a religious procession, striking and chiming all the metal street furniture he encountered on his way. Here Wilson-Perkin cynically uses the language of Swedenborg's spiritualism (the disembodied knocking of a sèance) to communicate with the unseen and unknown, looking for knowledge. "Knock, knock", but nobody replies; "Who's there?". Maybe the keepers of knowledge have moved on from spirituality to something more expensive and private.



HOW COME

ANDREW COOPER


In How Come Andrew Cooper takes us on a distorted, hallucinatory journey. Exploring the 'art world', capitalism and labour values with a cast of grotesque characters. Like Stan The Artist, a semi-autobiography combined with and influenced by the ridiculous stories and behaviour of Cooper's own uncle Stan. See Stan try to find his place in the art world but instead find only a brutal, monstrous market place. Join Nuggity Nugget and Nugget Nuggity, two lumps of gold so commodified that they wandered out of the mine all on their own. Finally, find all the products you need with helpful adverts for cat food (made from human meat) and the brand-new 'Commodity" (complete with angelic voice and a fully working orifice....eughh)



COME SKINK* WITH US.



29/09/2016



Press release:


MUTTON FIST PRESS is a large-format, relief printmaking studio, located within the new Five Years complex in Archway. Mutton Fist is devised and occupied by Gareth Berwyn, Lisa Cradduck and Adam Piper.


Private but open to intervention, our fist-hole will be a workshop, classroom, publishing house and gallery, with no fixed agenda beyond strong print and free will.


An oily, black Albion squats in the corner of our room, greedy to nibble and spit what we feed it.


*An old term applied to drink or drinking around the imposing stone in order to celebrate some auspicious occasion.