Fire Air Water Earth

Fire Air Water Earth presents nine of Joe Tilson’s limited edition prints from the 1970s that unravel and enlighten our understanding of the artist’s substantial wooden paintings and sculpture made during the same decade. These wooden works are currently on view in the exhibition Joe Tilson: ALCHERA at Marlborough London and alongside the prints of Fire Air Water Earth demonstrate the diversity of Tilson’s artistic practice, having first trained at the Brixton School of Building.

Together these screenprints and collages mark a historic moment in Tilson’s graphic output, directly reflecting the artist’s move away from London to the countryside of Wiltshire and Tuscany. Constituting part of the larger body of work entitled ALCHERA, Tilson’s influences at this time emerge from extensive research in fields as wide as Australian Aboriginal history to the alchemical studies of Carl Jung and the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke among others.

The striking collages and prints of Fire Air Water Earth and Tilson’s Alchera Cycle simultaneously move away from Pop Art themes in order to grapple with deeper environmental and philosophical concerns. In particular they explore orders and cycles in time and nature, building on Tilson’s fascination with the “four elements of imaginative experience” as well as his distinctive use of text and language.

Despite their occasionally esoteric content, these ambitious prints broke the rules of conventional printmaking at the time, incorporating collaged photography, string, silver leaf and even a bird’s feather, translating Tilson’s unmistakable wit and experimental temperament into remarkable compositions in their own right. Given their ecological agency and investigation of the natural world, these works, like the unique ALCHERA wooden works, are relevant now more than ever before.