Screen-print made as part of the exhibition - forever and just for one day. A-M-G5, 20 Albert Road, Glasgow (2022)

Four layer screen-print on Somerset paper. Museum glass and aluminium frame. Dimensions inc frame: 270 x 350mm

Edition of 25 published by A-M-G5

Printed by M.A.R.S

Alan Hathaway is an artist born in London and currently based in The North East of England. He make installations, prints and drawings which explore his long standing fascination with the social and political dimensions of experimental popular music and modernist abstraction.

As a teenager growing up in Britain during the 1980s, pop music offered a compelling alternative to what he describes as his ‘otherwise limited, claustrophobic, suburban, working class environment’ – and it was through pop’s visuals that he first encountered art. Jamie Reid’s incendiary work for the Sex Pistols, and Peter Saville’s austere designs for Factory Records, delineated a new visual landscape encompassing détourned found imagery and the reductive anti-marketing aesthetic of the blank record sleeve, or monochrome. This new terrain stood in stark contrast to his immediate environment; abstracting it beyond recognition. ‘The act therefore of becoming a fan was for Hathaway analogous to that of becoming an artist – making the most of fragments of experience and then representing them through material means’ (Andrew Mummery 2022).

He uses industrial materials and improvised processes which combine analogue and digital video, screen-printing, chance and play. Through a forensic approach to archival material he examines the way in which our cultural memories are forged by particular kinds of film stock, printing technologies, surfaces, recording techniques and spatial encounters. His work can be seen as an attempt to assert cultural production as a means of resistance to the ‘banal fact of being in the world’ (Simon Critchley, On Bowie 2016) – a terrain which he explores equally through found imagery and modes of abstract representation.