Andrew Stones ~ Brief Biography, 2011

Since 1984 Andrew Stones has worked extensively with gallery and site-specific installations, as well as undertaking written, musical and academic projects. He has worked as a solo producer and in collaboration with others, including long-term artistic partner Frances Hegarty.

As an artist Stones has used video and digital images, sound, light and a wide range of other forms and materials. His work has a sometimnes laconic, humorous edge, being inspired by the untidy collisions of art, science and technology. Despite a concern with the aesthetic, the work is conceptual, often responding to the ways in which knowledge, authority and power become linked and politicised.

Stones's early large-scale mixed-media works such as Geiger (1989), Class (1990/93), The Conditions, (1993) Those Days Are Gone (1994) were presented throughout the UK, and in Europe. His videotapes, including A History of Disaster with Marvels (1992) made for Channel 4 Television, have been screened in many media art event worldwide.

Stones often focuses his wide interests via historically legitimated sites, artifacts or metaphors. In Normal Numbers (1998) - a ten-year artwork for the exterior of the People's History Museum in Manchester - an array of abbreviations and numerals in electronically sequenced neon represented various cells and substances in 'normal' human blood, whilst simultaneously referencing the 19th century use of the building as a pumping station for hydraulic power. In Those Days Are Gone (1994) the vaulted interior of a large gallery was truncated and darkened by a false ceiling, as part of a strategy to highlight and reinterpret traditionalist notions of heritage evoked by the building.

He pursues a critical interest in cultural identity and nostalgia, and in the uses of recorded history, especially in relation to ideas of Englishness and what these might mean in a European or global context. In 1996/7 Crowd Control, a solo show of gallery installations concerned with some of these themes, toured in the UK. A later work Victorian Car Chase (2002) uses subtitles and audio montage to reference aspects of Englishness traced in the collective soundtrack of cinema, television and radio.

In 1998 Stones was commissioned to install the temporary neon work Provincially Provisionally on the exterior of the Town Hall in his home city of Sheffield. This was a witty and subversive work parodying the fuzzily-aspirational tone of local government branding and cultural administration. In 1999 he presented Cloud Cover, an Arts Council funded show of installations with video for Battersea Arts Centre in London, which occupies a former Town Hall building.

In 1999 the pianist Joanna MacGregor's Sound Circus collaboration with the artist toured several venues in the UK, travelling to Seville in 2000.

Site-specificity has become central in Stones's more recent work, especially in collaborative projects with artist Frances Hegarty. In 1997 the Irish Museum of Modern Art awarded the first Nissan Art Project to Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones, to produce For Dublin, a multi-site neon work for Dublin city centre. Hegarty & Stones have since established a collaborative practice centred on large scale, site-specific, temporary public art works which bring elements of illusion, temporal play, and humour to public locations. Since 1998 they have been commissioned to make major site-specific works in the cities of Sheffield (Seemingly So Evidently Not Apparently Then, Site Gallery 1998), Birmingham (Orienteer (A-Z, Dawn to Dusk) Ikon Gallery 2000), Belfast (Overnight Sensation, Ormeau Baths Gallery 2001) Bradford (Extra, Bradford Film Office 2002/3).

In 2006 Hegarty & Stones presented the commissioned work Ex Machina in Carlow, Ireland; and in 2007 the suite of gallery installations Tactically Yours at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.

In 2001 Stones was awarded a 3-year Fellowship by the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA, UK) enabling him to visit science establishments and sites of iconic significance, collecting of video, audio and digital photographs. He set up short residencies at Arecibo Radio Observatory (Puerto Rico); and Big Bear Solar Observatory (California); and visits to CERN (Switzerland). In this way he developed his already established interest in the historical narratives of science. In 2003 he produced Tell Us Everything an 8-channel audio installation for the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London.

After staging the large scale video/audio event Accumulator in Cork in 2003, the artist presented the installation Atlas in 2004. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and premiered at Chisenhale Gallery, London, Atlas utilises video and audio material gathered at CERN. Concurrent with this installation is the artist's book/monograph Outside Inside. Documenting almost 20 years' of work, Outside Inside also introduces the first pieces from a new body of photoworks begun in 2001.

In 2007 Stones presented Midnight at Wildbrow Hall at Peri Gallery of photography in Turku, Finland, prior to undertaking a residency in the town of Nagu/Nauvo on the edge of the Finnish archipeligo. The Nagu/Nauvo micro-site presents a collection of web-resolution photo-works made during this stay in Finland.

In 2010, under the performing name Mister Salmon, he released on CD and digital formats the full-length album Mister Salmon ...in Yorkshirama.

In 2006 Stones embarked on a period of full-time PhD study, gaining his doctorate in Fine Art from Slade School of Art/UCL in 2011 with the written thesis: What Art and Science Want: Disciplines and Cultrures in Contention.

Download: Andrew Stones CV / resumé [.pdf]

Artists’ archives: http://www.brighter.org