Giles oldershaw biography samples

Friday 23rd August – Sunday 27th October

Everyone Involved was an exhibition by Ian Giles, commissioned by ‘a space’ arts. Ian enlivens queer archives by collaborating with LGBTQIA+ pioneers to amplify their achievements and legacies. His films and performances grow out of embedded relationships, first hand research and a multidisciplinary studio practice.

Everyone Involved is an immersive installation and film featuring ‘A Gay Song’, which is heralded as the first LGBTQIA+ protest song recorded onto vinyl in 1972. Ian reformed the original band to re-record the song 52 years after its inception. This act of reunion was a cross generational gesture of thanks and also an example of the living legacy of the gay liberation movement in the UK.

The song at the centre of the film speaks of self-love and celebrates being gay as part of nature’s natural diversity. It was recorded only 5 years after the partial decriminalisation of sex between men was passed in England in 1967. It encapsulates the spirit of the early gay rights movement which promoted the mantra that ‘Gay is Good’ in counterbalance to centuries of oppression. The song was written by Alan Wakeman and Michael Klein and was originally performed in Soho in a studio used to record foreign language teaching tools. ‘A Gay Song’ formed part of an album made by the band, ‘Everyone Involved’ which included environmental and human rights songs. 1000 copies of the album were then given out for free and some were buried in a time capsule in Brazil.

Ian chose to work with the song for his Southampton commission as it nods to the ethos of the 1976

Francis Bacon painted provocative and disturbing images that carry a raw sense of anxiety and alienation. They reflect that existential fear, loathing and incomprehension at the atrocities of the Holocaust that came to light at the end of World War Two. These are parts of his works.

And our task was to depict Ryan’s picture with soft pastel which was amended just like the format of Francis Bacon’s picture so I selected this photo for my drawing.

Actually, it was not easy to depict him in my drawings because as you can see from the picture, there is no specific bold line or structure that I can focus on. The photo was actually blurred, and it was hard to modulate the strength and weakness of the color.

This is my work. To be honest, I was not satisfied with my work because it was lack of backgrounds, and the details and mood of the photo was not really described well on my drawing. Maybe I had problems with managing time efficiently on drawing. I only focused on sketching with pastel, so that’s why I couldn’t work more on detail things. (Sorry for non-rotation of the photo 😦

At home, I had a homework to annotate the body of the models in our class and I chose myself as a model because I’m not good at describing people’s appearance of the back.

I focused on proportion of my body because teacher always emphasized the importance of making realistic proportion of the human body when we are do a realistic description. In the background, I used brilliant and fancy colors to make the mood of my picture more bright and active.

We were required to bring our pictures depicted in format of Francis Bacon’s style, but I couldn’t prepare appropriate image of my face, so I used Ryan’s image again. Soft pastel was easy to use than other medias such as watercolours or charcoals because it doesn’t only depict the slim line but also express various of atmosphere by using mixture of colors and rub the colors by hand. I think this work is better than my previous work ab