John Finn: New Exhibition

Exhibition ‘Love Notes to Shrewsbury’ by John Finn

25 May to 8 June
The Bear Steps Art Gallery, 2 St. Alkmund's Place, Shrewsbury, SY1 IUJ​​​​​​​

With a successful exhibition last year ‘This is my Name’, John Finn the deafblind artist faced the prospect of how he could create a second, even better exhibition. The bench mark was very high and he hit a creative block for a while. He knew it had to be a “Shrewsbury theme” but he did not know what or how to create. Also the gallery was a very large room to fill, so the pressure was on him.

Looking around for inspiration, he stumbled across his childhood games from the 1970s. One of the games was a Spirograph Drawing Board. He opened a well beaten battered box from the 1970s, to find, to his amazement, that it still contained a lot of the plastic toothed discs almost complete including a full set of pens. Even more amazing, a stack of papers with various drawings that he drew as a 6 and 7 year old sighted self. Now blind, he was not able to see what he had done as a sighted child so he scanned all the works he had done and magnified them on his monitor so that he could then see what he had done 45 years ago. By manipulating the colours on his computer, he was able to see elements of the drawings.

It was a strange mixed journey, with a realisation that he has now been blind for longer than he was sighted. Sheer happiness to see what he h ad made mixed with profound sadness that he could no longer see or do what he could as a sighted child. He decided to illustrate his childhood by creating Artworks inspired by and using elements of his childhood artwork. Call it upcycling! It was an emotional journey with a mixture of teary sadness and bursts of sheer marvel of what he created as a sighted child.

This emotional roller coaster experience has led John on to create “Love Notes to Shrewsbury”. He remembered Shrewsbury from the eyes of his 5 to 21 years old sighted self before he left Shropshire to study film-making at the London Film School. John returned to Shropshire after many years as a deafblind person. Every now and then, like many blind people, he would lose his bearings not knowing where he was. There was no point looking around where he was as he is too blind to recognise any shops or road signs, and it was pointless asking around as he was too deaf to understand what anyone was saying. He relied on his childhood memories to pinpoint whereabouts he was by looking up to the rooflines.

Shrewsbury boasts amazing varied rooflines so distinctive from each other. The rooflines had not changed much since 1970s so that was helpful, He looked up to see the sky meeting the roofs to tell him where he was - almost like a map.

John has used this experience to create artworks based on the rooflines of Shrewsbury, where every roof has a story. The Abbey, for example, was his starting point, and his ending was where his parent’s house had been, his old home. Wyle Cop was where he had to do an emergency stop and did the hill start successfully during his driving test after only taking four lessons during two weeks to learn to drive. He had never before driven through the centre of Shrewsbury so it was a shock when the examiner said to drive there. He had to do a three point turn next to the New Market. It was a white knuckle ride! He passed his driving test to the devastation of his parents who had hoped he had failed so that he would take more driving lessons!

Through the creation of ‘Love Notes to Shrewsbury’, He learnt and rediscovered the beauty of the buildings. Severely colour blind, he couldn’t perceive what he is seeing in a natural setting. On his computer he digitally adjusted the colours to allow things to pop out turning what he couldn’t see into what he could see. It was quite a laborious process trying to find a colour that would help the image jump out. He had no idea what colour he created so relied on his wife to tell him that he had used blues and purples with a tinge of pink. He decided to use orangey yellowy for the sky to allow the rooflines to jump out. The choice of colours was not intended as a support of Shrewsbury Town FC as he hated playing football as a child(!)