John Dargan

John studied at Canterbury College of Art, now the University for the Creative Arts from 1983-1986 graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. He took his Master’s degree at Chelsea School of Art 1987-1988, with large scale images about his family’s shared fascination with football and, in particular, Millwall Football Club. In 1989 he was offered a residency at Ipswich Town Football Club, part of a larger project documenting various communities in Ipswich.

From this point John realised that much of what drove and motivated his image-making stemmed from his experience as working class. He became concerned with documentary approaches to depicting aspects of class and was initially drawn to making images of the environments he had grown up in.

A painter of Hyper-Realist works, such as his oil on panel ‘Caravan’ in the John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool 1999 and more recent outputs and events include responses to museum collections in Dover and Faversham, artist in residence in a working boatyard and an interactive installation. He had a solo exhibition ‘Nothing Much’ at Gainsborough’s House Gallery, Sudbury in 2000 and has also exhibited at South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell with group shows at Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Royal Over-Seas League both 1998.

By the mid 2000’s, John had started teaching at UCA in Canterbury, as well as making and exhibiting work. His practice had broadened into Moving Image, Animation, Illustration and book arts. Since 2006, John has worked as Pathway Leader for Lens-Based Media in Further Education at Canterbury. In 2012 he was selected as Artist in Residence for Room, an Arts Council initiative aimed at raising the profile of the Arts in North Kent, resulting in a project about the Iron Wharf Boatyard in Faversham. In 2013 he obtained a postgraduate certificate in Education at the University for the Creative Arts.

Prior to this he organised a multi-disciplinary Arts Festival in Faversham called Fludde. Two years later this was followed by Sham Fever, an interactive moving image installation in the Guildhall, Faversham. This led to commissions by Dover Arts Development to create a response to the Drop Redoubt on Dover Western Heights. John made short films and an animation investigating the patrician and deadly treatment of working-class soldiers at the hands of complacent leaders.

In 2018 John was commissioned to respond to the Fleur-De-Lis Museum collection in Faversham as part of a project commemorating World War 1. This resulted in an animated installation placed in the window of the museum, with sound projected out onto the street. The animation detailed some of the activity in the War at the huge Gunpowder Works, the Cotton Powder Company, outside Faversham on the North Kent marshes. The animation focused on the treatment of the workers at this site.

In recent years John has been focusing on Council Housing on a series of works provisionally titled ‘Contradictions in the Built Environment’. This has had a variety of iterations, including a collaborative installation at the Brewery Tap Gallery in Folkestone, as well as showing the book arts at Book Fairs in Eastbourne and Bristol, and Whitechapel Gallery, made as the initial part of the project. This has culminated in an animation, currently in progress, that focuses on patrician attitudes to housing, detailing the underlying factors producing responses to the built environment that attempted to create affordable housing for working class people.