Benedict Drew

Benedict Drew (b. 1977, Kyneton, Australia) lives and works in Whitstable and Margate, UK. He has made installations, video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and music. Solo exhibitions include The Trickle-Down Syndrome (Whitechapel Gallery, 2017), KAPUT (QUAD, 2015), and Heads May Roll (Matt’s Gallery, 2014). Drew has released music on labels such as Mana Records and Bloxham Tapes, he often collaborates with artists and musicians, Currently active collaborations include a duo with Arianne Churchman, who have released two LP’s on Love’s Devotee & Folklore Tapes, the art collective Plastique Fantastique and the quartet Decentred (with Tom Chant, Angharad Davies and John Edwards). Drew founded the label Thanet Tape Centre in 2020 and regularly makes works for radio. He is a lecturer at Slade School of Fine Art and is represented by Matt’s Gallery. 

http://www.benedictdrew.com/
https://thanettapecentre.bandcamp.com/

Featured releases

"Wild soundscapes from Benedict Drew, an artist splitting his time between installation art and music that hums and spills over with vivid material encounters; sounds are slurpy, runny, fizzy, spongy, hard as rock. Following digital releases, a tape for patten’s Kaleidoscope label, a musical score to accompany his De Re Touch video art project commissioned by Transport for London’s Art on the Underground, and many active years in London’s experimental music scene through work with the London Musicians’ Collective, as a solo performer, and via live collaborations with artists including Rhodri Davies, Chris Watson and Sachiko M; ‘Crawling Through Tory Slime’ is Drew’s debut long-playing record. Music on each of the record’s faces bleeds together continuously, recalling long improvisational sets, floor-sucking dub-wise, psychedelia, plunderphonics, and tight GRM-era electronic sound design pieced together with drum machines, cloudy synthesiser, bits n’ bobs. There’s a certain English charm, humour and taste for cheap science fiction and cobbled-together escape routes out of reality that follows a lineage set out by artists like Jeff Keen or Bruce Lacey, reset for the exciting horrors and delights of contemporary life. Benedict Drew’s solo exhibition The Trickle Down Syndrome runs from June to September at the Whitechapel Gallery, designed over the same period as the LP and "drawing on wide-ranging references, from the stage sets of classic Hollywood cinematographer Busby Berkeley to the Surrealist worlds of artist Max Ernst"."

Benedict Drew – Crawling Through Tory Slime

Past events