TERRY FLAXTON
British artist Terry Flaxton (b. 1953) has exhibited internationally since 1978. in 1971 he encountered sound, oil, etching, photography & film on entering Wimbledon College of Art – then video where he received a BA in communication design at the University of East London in 1979. Establishing himself as a Video Artist in the early years of Channel 4 he was commissioned to create work for Channel 4’s Eleventh Hour, Ghosts in the Machine which aired on PBS (Alive from Off Centre) and French TV (Avance Sur Image). He produced a series of 5 programs on Video Art for Channel 4 in 1986-1998.
He spent years working as cinematographer and as writer, director, producer and editor on productions for channel 4, and the BBC including US and Soviet Foreign Policy in the 3rd World with Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Steele. As a cinematographer he worked on promos for Queen Latifa and Van Morrisson and for MTV and Polygram with Def Leppard, Stones, Blink 182, John Mclaughlin fo which he won many awards.
In 2007 he became one of the first practice based Creative Research Fellows in the UK, and a Professor of Cinematography and Director of the Centre for Moving Image Research (2013), and in 2018 gained a PhD in High Resolution Imaging.
His work has been exhibited at over 200 festivals, museums and galleries and he has won prizes at Locarno, Montbeliard, Amsterdam and Algiers. He has had retrospectives at diverse locations such as Moscow, Algiers, Dublin, Rome, Ljubljana and Mill Valley. His works are held in collections including Lux London, Video les Beaux Jours, Strasbourg, Filmmakers Cooperative NY and AICE Milan. 4 Recent exhibitions in New York Cathedral attracted over 1 million visitors each. His 2008 work “In Re Ansel Adams” is in the permanent collections of the Harris Museum in Preston and the RWA Bristol where he is a lifetime academician, an honour accorded to only 160 living academicians. He became a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2020.
Terry Flaxton | select exhibitions
2021
Royal West Academy | Bristol, UK, regularly since 2014 | 168th Annual Open Exhibition
2019
Istanbul Experimental Film Festival
2016
The Presidential Palace, Florence, Italy | In Other People’s Skins
2012 to 2017 (4 recurring six month exhibitions)
The Cathedral of St John the Divine New York | In Other People’s Skins & The Intersection of Dreams
2010
Xi’an Academy of Fine Art, Xi'an, China | In Other People’s Skins
Terry Flaxton | select works
Talking Heads | 1979 | 20 mins
A diatribe on the nature of the media from the vantage point of the the Talking Head - the authoritative voice, down in numerous festivals, won a prize at the 1979 Tokyo Video Festival
Password: THarst2473!
Prisoners | 1984 15 mins 48 seconds
In 1983 Apple Computers approached Ridley Scott to make the commercial for the launch of the Mac. They also asked me to cover that making. On the set were neo nazis, anarchists, add agency people, the commercial crew all of which were situated in Thatchers Britain and Orwell’s phenomenal alert to the ills of fascism and communism - Prisoners was my experimental meditation on what was happening during this moment.
The World Within Us | 1987 | 16 mins 12 seconds
Commissioned by Channel 4’s Ghosts in the Machine together with many well know artists The World Within Us was made at a moment when a close friend was dying. This work won awards at both the Locarno and Montbeliard festivals and has appear at festivals around the world as well as being broadcast on Channel 4 PBS (Alive from Off Centre) and French TV (Avance Sur Image.
Password Warst3742!
To Stand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape | 2011 – 2019 | 62 minutes
Begun in 2011 To Stand and Stare: A Somerset Landscape documented the lives and attitudes of Somerset craftspeople and artists in a set of 10 foot high portraits to demonstrate the nobility of the working person. This work is an attempt to encode the attitudes of the analogue into the way in which an image maintained and not cut away from lifts the audience into a transcendent state and offers a commentary on the digital.
