The Broken Toy Company - a collective with a twist

All the creatives live in one head.

Hello and happy weekend 🎉

This is the third in a series of spotlight articles featuring our paid members. You can read our previous one here. It has been such a brilliant experience opening up my inbox to creatives working across Northumberland and beyond! I have already met some wonderful people and it has been a pleasure hearing their stories and learning more about the work they are doing here in our small corner of the world. We hope you enjoy reading them too.

This week I am catching up with Dex Hannon, an abstract expressionist who moves between paint, digital, sound, and photography mediums. We discuss having work displayed at Woodhorn, how Northumberland sparks inspiration and the benefits of digital collaboration.

You can visit Dex’s website here.

In May we will see the release of his debut collection of short stories, under the writing name of Dexuality Valentino, through Paul Smith Publishing.

Dex will be doing some events to promote the book, hopefully at Blyth Library, or Republic Gallery. More information on the Stories: Dexuality Valentino – Goodbye Armadillo Paul Smith Publishing  

Tell us a little bit about your background…

I grew up in Manchester and studied there, ran music nights and had a great art studio in Centre of Manchester, but I was dragged kicking and screaming over the Pennines to Yorkshire. 😉

In Manchester I painted as Dexuality Valentino, China 9, Evil Jesus and Dex Hannon and continued to create as each of those characters when I moved to Huddersfield. I was asked to speak about working as several artists at once at Huddersfield University, but thought that might be dull. So I pulled in a film crew, wrote a quick script for a mockumentary about an interviewer interviewing the artists.

The Broken Toy Company is the Collective name for all my alter egos. It’s similar to a Writer changing their name to write a different genre, I do the same thing, new name for new project if it differs greatly.

My wife and I have been coming up to Northumberland for around 10 years and dreamed of moving up here, we were living in Huddersfield at the time, Covid hit and it seemed like as good a time as any to sell up and move to Northumberland.

We had predominantly been staying further into Northumberland, Seahouses, Newton by the sea, we also got married in Lindisfarne Castle. But when we were looking for somewhere to live we accidentally moved to Blyth, we fell in love with the place and the people. We immediately felt welcome and felt a connection here.

You work in collaboration with people from around the globe. How does that work and are there benefits to this digital world we are living in?

I’ve been working with AneurGasm on SkinGasm for a few years now on several projects, its quite interesting working with someone you have never met, never even spoken to, the first album was an experiment in destroying each others music and making something new, which is similar to how I work artistically, painting something and then creating a digital remix of it.

I also work with a vocalist and artist called Eunice Cazarez a Mexican American in a band called DVEC, again we have never met or spoken to each other. We met on Instagram, she asked me for some help with how to talk about her art, how to promote herself. I did that and she did vocals. She was the first person I made music with, I had a load of poems and ideas but hated my voice so asked her to perform them.  I emailed her words and she emailed me the audio files.

We made an EP and got signed to a small label to release two albums. Our first attempt at music. We had our music on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction a couple of times.

You recently had some work displayed at Woodhorn as part of the WOW Northumberland collection…

It is a great feeling to get some work in to the WOW Northumberland show. I’ve not had chance to start getting out there as yet up here in Northumberland. It is like starting again when you move somewhere new. Blyth and the North East has definitely driven this new work that started as a series of photographs, usually my work is digital remixes of my paintings, taking the concept of the painting and turning it on its head or continuing a conversation.

I see a correlation with Blyth and Northumberland here. Especially in Blyth, there are remnants of the past, and also an eye on the future. There seems to be an energy in the North East, a feeling that things are improving and we are looking to the future, but still retaining that connection with the past. My work I hope reflects that.

The technique of creating the new body of work is time consuming, it starts with photographs of local places, what I call ‘Blythian Memes’ buildings and objects I have come across on walks I like the look of. I then animate these using a rudimentary stop frame concept with PhotoShop and then create a film of overlapping imagery, to create new shapes, now compositions, reflecting the state of transition that I feel is happening here. It is still in a state of flux, an almost reality.

The film is then examined, frame by frame to look for new interesting compositions. I then take screen shots of those compositions and then meticulously digitally repaint them in Illustrator and PhotoShop.

Thanks so much to our recent supporters here at Culture Northumberland:

Esmé Weijun Wan,Vanessa Priest, Lindsey Mclaren, Louise Mabbs,Hilary Elder, Republic Gallery, Dex Hannon, Dispel Develop,Alison Edwards,A Recumbent Prattler, Lyn Campbell, Chloe Daniels, Sarah Morpeth - you’ll learn more about their work soon.