SUNDERLAND GIG

MICHAEL PENNIE (1936–2019), Emeritus Professor of Sculpture at Bath Spa University was an inspirational artist, sculptor of genius and gifted teacher. He was a warm and generous person, loved by his family and by generations of students and faculty at the Bath Academy of Art and its successor institutions with which he was associated for nearly sixty years since arriving at Corsham Court from the Royal College of Art in 1962. Michael was a man of Tyneside who loved Sunderland, a place of Anglo-Saxon scholarship in Bede’s St Peter’s church, a place of obsession with football and its rivalries, and a place which where the challenges facing the post-industrial north-east are most apparent.

JOHN STRACHAN is a literary critic, poet, curator, and historian. He is Professor of English and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Bath Spa University. He was previously Professor of English at the University of Sunderland and at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.  As Director of Bath Spa’s Corsham Court campus in Wiltshire, where Professor Michael Pennie was Artist-in-Residence, he worked closely with Michael, collaborated with him on a number of artworks, and reminisced about the North-East.

The hand-printed letterpress book was designed, typeset and printed by Bridget and Ivor Heal at QoD Press.

Each book, of the limited edition of twenty-six, is unique. The original artworks were reproduced using silkscreen and were hand coloured.
Twenty-one copies are numbered 1–21 and signed by the poet. Five are numbered I–V and are hors de commerce.

Format: 230 x 380mm / Paper: Somerset Satin 300gsm / Extent: 12 pages / Binding: 6pp case binding over 3mm board with heritage buckram.