Colin Booth: Making Strange

Overlooking the site of the historic 1930s St Leonards Bathing Pool on Seaside Road, you’ll find Electro Studios Project Space: independent, artist-run galleries offering a rare, open-door opportunity for artists and curators to propose exhibitions and projects.

This is most likely where you will find mixed-media artist Colin Booth, who set up these studios 25 years ago and now manages them in addition to both gallery spaces. Hailing from Gateshead, now residing in St Leonards on Sea, via London, Colin works with painting, installation, sculpture and text. Colin’s interest in found materials, the complexities of light, colour, texture and reflection combined with his philosophical and often humorous take on objects and life, merge in an impressive expression of conceptual sculpture.

Making Strange is a reflection of the last 15 years of Colin’s work, taking over the entire space at Electro Studios in a one-off show, part of Coastal Currents 2024. We were keen to find out more…

How long has this show been in the making?

All my working life, in a way, you could say! I’ve had to postpone the show for two years running for a number of reasons and I felt I had to finally do something this year.

It’s very exciting for me, I’ve never had a solo exhibition in Hastings, and I have a lot of new work to show, and this will be a good opportunity to reflect upon how my work has developed and changed over the past 15 years or so. Intuitively, it feels like the right time to be doing this, I don’t always feel this about exhibiting work, but I do about this show. And I’m also allowing people to come into my studio, which is something I wouldn’t normally do.

Have you always been an artist?

I went to art college many years ago, dropped out for a few years, and came back into it. I finished my fine art degree in Newcastle, then went to Edinburgh to study art history. After that, I started writing about art and reviewing shows for some of the London magazines at the time. Then I moved into writing about film and moved to London for 10 years to work as a film journalist, writing for all sorts of magazines and newspapers. For a while, I was The Face magazine film critic. However, I started to dream about paintings. Working as a journalist had its rewards, and I made a good living, but it wasn’t fulfilling. I had moved to Hastings Old Town in the late ‘80s and when I started living there full-time a few years later, I took up painting again. My work slowly evolved into working in three dimensions – I started using neon, text and marble… and I’ve been working in mixed media ever since. The work in Making Strange is a reflection of that.

Where do you find inspiration?

I like the idea of picking up things that have no value and bringing them into the studio. They might sit there for years, but eventually, they’ll be brought into a piece of work. More recently I have been collecting natural objects. I have gathered some palm fronds from a tree in Alexandra Park, which are easy to ignore, as they are everywhere, but when you look at these things out of context they take on a new meaning and can be very poignant and beautiful as objects in their own right..I have a lot of eucalyptus branches too, and also some lichen on dead branches which I collected from Rye Harbour. The lichen reminds me that all of us are alive and dying at the same time.

Family too is a big influence in my work – having children really changed my work.

Do you have any aspirations for how people might feel when they see your work? I can’t really tell people how to respond to my work, no artist can. Therefore, it’s an open book and people can respond in any way they want. The important thing for me as an artist is that when I show work, whatever I show, I have absolute confidence in it.

In the past, I’ve made a mistake of putting things in exhibitions that I wasn’t quite sure about and that can often leave you open to caring more about what people think. That’s not a good place to be. I’m happy just to get a response. There’s quite a lot of humour in this work, too, for instance, ‘Joy’ the tree trunks wearing swimming trunks – people’s initial reaction is often to laugh when they see them and that’s the right reaction, but then they stop and think…I don’t believe art should be simple. I think it can be direct, I think it can give instant meaning, an impression. But the best art doesn’t stop there, it goes beyond that. That’s what I hope for my show when it opens.

Is there an overarching theme to Making Strange?

Time, memory, chance…how things come together by accident. I like to work with found materials and to transform things which often have little or no value, into something interesting and unexpected. It’s easy to forget that all artists work with ‘found’ or pre-existing materials. Paints and canvas are just that. It’s the process of transforming or working with these materials that can potentially elevate them into something else, which we like to consider as art.

A theme in a lot of my work is ‘balance’ or ‘just about managing’. On an individual level, relationship level and societal level. Whatever is thrown at us, we might wobble, but we stand firm, we carry on. You can see that represented in a lot of my work.

Have you ever had a show of this size before?

No, no. I’ve had substantial shows in public galleries in the past, but there’s not often a lot of opportunity to show my work at scale, as it’s sculpture, it’s installation and it requires a lot of space. I could probably fill these galleries several times over, but I suspect most artists working in three dimensions could say the same. In a way, Making Strange is a kind of ‘where I’m at now’ kind of show. I don’t want to call it a retrospective, because it’s not. It’s more a survey show of work completed over the last 15 years or so.

Making Strange opens on 6 September 2024
at Electro Studios Project Space
Seaside Road
St Leonards on Sea
TN38 0AL

Opening Friday 6 September 6pm – 9pm with DJ and drinks celebration
Galleries open 7, 8, 14, 15 September
(Sat/Sun only) 12pm – 5pm or by appointment
colinbooth.com

@colin_booth_
@electro_studios_project_space_