Willaim Curwen Resume
CV 2021
1955:- Born in Liverpool, England
1966:- Started taking photographs and became a delinquent.
1972:- I flunked my A level studies and began work as a junior trainee medical laboratory pathology technician at Fazakerley Hospital, Liverpool.
1975:- Due to mathematical dyslexia, I also flunked my ONC medical exams, and ran away to West Surrey College of Art and Design to study photography.
1978-1982:- Having had a fantastic education, I left WSCAD with a Surrey Diploma (2:1) and started work for Colour Library International; a stock photography library who specialised in travel picture books. I completed assignments all over America, Germany, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, The Caribbean, Shetland, Orkney, and most significantly, the North West Scottish Highlands. I gravitated naturally towards landscape and architecture, and began to understand the power of illusion through story telling. This was a world of unrestricted travel culture before the onset of climate change and mass tourism, which has now gone.
1982:- Returned to Liverpool to live and work as a freelance location photographer at a time when the city had a thriving independent multicultural arts and music scene. I became successful, and worked in advertising and design, editorial journalism and publishing, and used my earnings to fund my development as an exhibiting artist.
1984:- Exhibited in the Open Eye gallery group exhibition ‘Merseyside Gardens & Gardeners’, and subsequently in other group shows there.
1986:- Took part in the Visual Stress ‘Urban Vimbuza’ deconstruction event at the Liverpool Bluecoat; shooting pictures on Polaroid instant slide film then projecting them live while the event was still happening as a precursor to Instagram and Facebook.
1990:- The ‘Into The Light’ exhibition at the Liverpool Bluecoat gallery, alongside Tom Wood, Sean Halligan, Peter Hagerty, and Stephen McCoy. This exhibition was pivotal in my acceptance by my peers as a landscape photographer.
1994:- Did a gruelling City & Guilds adult teacher training course at Liverpool City College. After my successful graduation, I decided not to go into teaching practice, and instead became my own student in what was then the brave new world of digital photography.
1995-1996:- Completed three highly experimental photography commissions for Liverpool’s Cream dance club, thus enabling to consolidate their house brand in global dance culture. This experience had a profoundly positive influence on my identity as an accepted independent artist.
1996:- Photography work having all but dried up, I worked briefly at PCL photo laboratory in Manchester as a photo retoucher. A big mistake - I was dismissed after three months. They went bust shortly after.
1997-1998:- Worked at Amaze digital studios in Liverpool for nine months. Never given a formal job description, but I did work on highly successful award winning animation projects for MTV and Oxford Scientific. This experience was arguably the very best and absolute worst of my working life. As an antidote between projects, I drove up to the North West Highlands for a sanity saving holiday taking landscape photographs in the incessant rain. This was a crucial life experience that stayed in my consciousness for years afterwards. I eventually left Amaze after deciding office bound web-developer world was not for me.
1998:- Commissioned by Liverpool Chamber of Commerce to produce a wall sized mural panoramic depiction of the Liverpool skyline for their year 2000 opening Business Development Centre. This successful commission ended in a disastrous copyright dispute, which dragged on until 2003 when I finally decided to leave professional photographic practice forever.
1999:- Exhibited a series of panoramic Liverpool cityscapes at the inaugural Biennial Festival - aka the TRACE - named after a famous Liverpool transvestite.
2000:- Became fascinated by the early 20th century pioneering colour photography of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky made through red, green and blue colour separation filters using panchromatic B&W glass plates. He was commissioned by the last Czar of Russia to document the geographically remote ethnic minorities and cultures of the Russia Empire. The surviving archive of glass plates is now held in the care of the US Library Of Congress. The fidelity and richness of colour of Produkin-Gorsky’s work inspired me to spend the next seven years to emulate and master this complex, demanding process. I am now in 2022 finally getting back to working in tri-colour again.
2000:- November ‘Inferno’ exhibited two large photographic pieces within a group exhibition held at venues in Liverpool - Manchester - Newcastle.
2002:- Exhibited a sequential set of panoramic photographs depicting the New Brighton lighthouse as surrounded by the incoming tide in conjunction with tri-colour photographs of flowers and urban graffiti, titled ‘The Unstoppable Forces Of Nature’. This work was shown at the Jump Ship Rat gallery within their internationalist group show called ‘All Things Fall, and are Built Again’ during the 2002 Liverpool Biennial, which was one of the best experiences of my artistic life.
2003:- Came to the realisation that after 25 years, my life as a freelance professional photographer was over, and began to grow my hair out - thus discovering the world was a kinder place than previously thought.
2006:- My mother died, and I began to realise that Liverpool had become a place where you can see the darkness in the daylight. I took a well earned holiday here in the North West Highlands. This positive experience told me I had to leave Liverpool for good. I had made a massive panoramic mural of the interior of the ManMuseum installation - before it was evicted from its temporary home in Rodney Street, Liverpool. This was exhibited in the then derelict warehouses on Jamaica Street, at what was to be my last public showing of work at a Liverpool Biennial.
2007:- March - Raucci / Santamaria Gallery Naples ‘1:1,000,000,000’ a group show with works by myself, Matt Collishaw and Herve Ingrand. Press Release -> WILLIAM CURWEN exposes photographic images printed with pigment ink on cotton paper, which can lead us back to a romantic and surreal imaginary like Turner’s paintings. The places described are landscapes or interiors where the technical photographic mean has a primary importance in the representation of space. The procedure he uses is the one of three shots in the classic black and white combined by three filters in red, blue and green which are then re-assembled with a computer superimposing the three coloured images and giving back the image in it’s natural colour. The outside space is codified in details through the computer screen to give back the present dimensions in reality which in the perceived image re-configures as unreal and nearly out of time.
2008:- Left Liverpool to start a new life in the Highlands, a week after the opening ceremony for Liverpool’s year as a Capital Of Culture.
2009:- September - travelled to Gweedore in Derry, Northern Ireland to make photographs of the sites represented by the photographer James Glass as hired by the (London)Derry Courts in 1889 to gather evidence in the trial for sedition by Father James McFadden at Derrybeg Chapel following the death of Inspector William Martin on the chapel grounds. This work led to a group exhibition in the city of Derry in 2014.
2010:- Became interested in the diffractive rendering of light through pinhole lenses, and began making high dynamic range panoramic pinhole photographs of my North West Highland landscape surroundings.
2011-12:- Built a wooden sea kayak entirely by hand without use of power tools. Learnt ‘stitch & glue’ technique, fibreglassing and varnishing. 400 hours work.
2014:- January - Exhibited a set of 12 panoramic photographs depicting 21st Century Gweedore in Derry Northern Ireland as part of the group show ‘The Glass Album’ (aka Dutch Tears) at The Factory Gallery in Derry as part of the Derry 2013 City Of Culture. The other exhibitors were Matt Collishaw and Eoghan McTeague. Then during the summer, my father died.
2014-2020:- A complex difficult time of being both a carer and being cared for; combined with an unrelenting exploration of panoramic landscape pinhole photography.
2017-2018:- Using boatbuilding, bookbinding, and dressmaking techniques, I built out of grey-board and brown paper, a gigantic high fidelity horn loudspeaker, locally known as The Great Horn Of Elphin’. 400 hours work.
2020:- Started construction and assembly work for my 2021 solo show ‘Light Is Liquid’. Began exploration of infrared photography and developmental construction of what I call ‘Frankensteen’ (sic) cameras. In March, I set up a Facebook page as an ongoing online illustrated diary of rural life under pandemic lockdown for an private audience of 100 friends.
2021:- April - ‘Light Is Liquid’ solo show at Rhue Arts. Ten large construction mural pieces of digital high dynamic range panoramic pinhole photography, as optical paintings, made from diffracted light.
I remain a delinquent artist.