About — JULIAN DAMS

Welcome.

Julian Dams is a British artist, making work since about 1990.

Please click on the MENU / WORK dropdown to see an expanded view of current and past projects.

Below are four projects that get me talking.

This surfaceworks four is all about drawing. Drawing and colour and letting the hand and arm do whatever it wants to. I can draw without thinking now. I should hope so, it's been going on for years.

My surfaceworks project began as a question concerning the relationship of painting and photography. Why photograph so much? Doesn’t painting slow things down?

My between the green spaces project is an exploration of the urban landscape, of walking, looking, and writing about the experience of photography, and the colour green.

It’s also about making a book of photographs with written text. Text which explores the act of looking.

The next photography book I make will inevitably take the piss out of myself for having made this one.

My scanning & retouching project is a recently-ish completed thing.

It’s just been too big to tackle any earlier than this, and better digital technology has helped me get there.

Between 2016 and 2019 I undertook a proper organisation of my analogue b&w archive, consisting of about 55,000 35mm negatives taken between 1990 and 2002. The folders were properly catalogued, and a complete set of digitised contact sheet booklets were created and then printed out. From this I was able to identify 17 projects which represent my formative experiences as an image maker, free from any demands made upon me other than myself, and the things I am visually drawn to. I scanned every worthy image relating to these projects, and for 14 months I retouched 1275 images at an average of 3 per day.

I finished retouching in April 2019, and this is the first time most of this b&w work has been accessible from outside of the cupboard it presently lives in. I wish anyone else trying to make sense of their own analogue archive the very best of luck.

Images from the beach work and land work projects. I had to describe them somehow,