Description
Richly illustrated (more than 250 illustrations and photos) and oversized monograph displaying the variety of Val Denham’s different styles, techniques and subjects from her early 70’s productions ’till now.
This is not a reprint but an entirely new book, with 80% previously unseen art and 20% indispensable highlights from the long sold-out first Val Denham book “Dysphoria”, making it an essential purchase for new and late-comers as well as those who already have the earlier book.
It also includes new texts: an appreciation by Graham “Ideal” Duff, an inside view by Gail Denham, and a spectacular seven page introduction by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, plus some very amusing and enlightening texts by Val herself, and archives with poems and correspondence from Genesis P-Orridge and Jhonn Balance.
288 pages. Hardcover with gold foil-block printing. Limited to 300 copies
About the artist:
Val Denham is an artist, poet, musician and transgender icon from Yorkshire, England.
Born in 1957, she has been creating her own universe since being a little boy.
She seems to have inspired a lot of people. Either way she couldn’t care less.
She has been labelled an “Outsider artist” in some quarters. However, she describes herself as “A cleaning lady”. Val perfectly explains her modus operandi: “I employ a figurative and non-figurative semi surrealist symbolism…my art is a kind of therapy…the internal map of my neuroses, severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Gender Dysphoria…analyse the surface of Tranart (Val’s name for her own art) and you glimpse neurotic hieroglyphs trying to describe what it is to be me…meanings are always masked in a kind of visual code within my work. Even now I employ obscuring patterns and imagery; though the reason to do so no longer exists…I no longer live a double life suppressing my true nature, but the code remains.”
She once did some record covers for Marc Almond, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and a few others She also releases her own idiosyncratic songs for her ever growing fan base across the world.