Graham Lambkin (born 1973 in Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist/publisher whose work embraces audio, visual and text-based concerns. Lambkin first came to prominence in the early 90's through the formation of his amateur music group
The Shadow Ring, who fused a D.I.Y. post-punk aesthetic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay, to create a unique hybrid sound that set it apart from its peers, and continues to exert an influence today. After the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a series of striking and highly original solo releases, including the critically acclaimed
Salmon Run,
Amateur Doubles, and
Community, as well as undertaking a string of collaborative projects with the likes of Joe McPhee, Keith Rowe, Moniek Darge, Jason Lescalleet, Michael Pisaro,
James Rushford, and Áine O'Dwyer.
Lambkin's visual art explores the metamorphic properties of the drawing medium in which the abstract and the figurative perpetually shape-shift across contrasting visual planes, thereby undermining the expected categories of image content. By turns somber and celebratory, Lambkin's visual idiom explores themes of environment, ecology and decay with a poetic nuance that betrays the weight of its subject matter. These works have been shown in several solo exhibitions:
Came To Call Mine (Audio Visual Arts Gallery, NYC, 2014),
Marble On The Rot (356 Mission Gallery, LA, 2015),
Moon Blows Close (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2016),
Mushroom Captivity (PiK, Köln, 2019), and
Time Runs Through The Darkest Hour (
Blank Forms, NYC, 2020). Lambkin's visual art has been documented across five hardback volumes, chiefly via Penultimate Press, London.
A similar spirit of collision between the familiar and uncanny informs Lambkin's spoken word/text-based performances and publications. The prosaic facets of life yield to mordant dream-like reflections that are at once banal and bizarre. Lambkin has performed these works internationally at such venues as The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, The Kitchen, NYC, The Sibelius Museum, Turku, The ICA, London, Vassar College, NY, Café OTO, London, CALarts, CA, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY, Fylkingen, Stockholm, and has seen three volumes of text-based work published to date.
In 2001 Lambkin founded the Kye label, which published over 60 audio editions by such artists as
Philip Corner, Gabi Losoncy, Malcolm Goldstein, Joe McPhee and Matthew Revert, as well as significant archival collections from Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge,
Henning Christiansen, and Lambkin's own Shadow Ring.
See also
The Shadow Ring.
