Niall MacCrann
Recent Work
MA degree show at the Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge (2023)
A selection of my life drawings from TOUCHDOWN.
I'm writing this a week after de-installing the the MA degree show, entitled TOUCHDOWN, at Cambridge School of Art. The opening event was really a blast - so many friendly old and new faces came along and engaged with the work. My work focused on the human form, our relationship with nudity, and evoking the tactile and multi-sensory through visual work. I showed a series of etchings called Why Can't They Draw Fruit? These are all available but limited to editions of 10 so please get in touch if interested. They'll also be going to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers annual exhibition (opens next Thursday at Bankside Gallery), and Woolwich Contemporary Print fair soon. I was also delighted to receive a Cambridge Artworks residency which at the very least helped me with the panicked floundering when people kept asking me "So, what next?".
Video of my projection installation Why Can't They Draw Fruit? (left), and two little visitors (image credit: Paul Burton).
Mill Road at Night (2023)
A set of 17 oil paintings for an exhibition at Cambridge Contemporary Art, May 26th-June 18th. These were created over the past year or so and focus heavily on the people of Cambridge's bustling, diverse Mill Road. All will be also be available from CCA's website shortly.
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Printmaking
Monoprint, etching, working with text, and animation. Printmaking formed a key part of my MA show at Cambridge School of Art in 2023 - see this blogpost, and see here for more printmaking.
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Emergent protagonists (2022-2023)
Working in monoprint, drypoint and oil, I've focused on scraping and wiping the human form out of ink or onto canvas. I want my figures to communicate, to shout "here I am" or to sigh. I have used sequential monoprint, repeatedly re-working a printing plate without cleaning between prints, to generate sequences, and in the film "Like Beacons", experimented with including text from my documentation. These working processes, as well as life drawing, and slack-jawed perusing of Elle Decoration, have fed into a series of large oil paintings of male nude figures grappling with capitalism's plundering of the body's sensuality. Some of this work, including Like Beacons was shown at the In Free Fall Exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge.
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Contactless Living (2021-2022)
In urban areas, the world looks different now. Contactless living is everywhere - especially in the way we eat, apparent in the blossoming of meal delivery scooters and bikes. When I moved to Cambridge in lockdowned 2020, these meal deliverers were often the only protagonists of the otherwise deserted street scenes I observed and sketched. Some of this work has been shown at the RBA Rising Stars exhibition 2021, Through The Red Door at the Zion Baptist Crypt (Cambridge), New Beginnings at the Blue House Yard gallery (London), and the 2022 ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries (London)
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Older work (2020-2021)
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