Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood announce new exhibition: ‘The Crow Flies Part One’
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and long-term collaborator Stanley Donwood have announced a new exhibition of artwork entitled, The Crow Flies Part One. Featuring new paintings Yorke and Donwood created together, it will run at the London art gallery Tin Man Art from September 6th-10th.
As with Yorke’s band The Smile, The Crow Flies Part One takes its name from a Ted Hughes poem. For the new collection, Yorke and Donwood looked to the late Poet Laureate’s 1970 work Crow for inspiration. The pair crafted the paintings together between 2021 and this year, with the project commencing as artwork for The Smile’s 2022 debut album, A Light For Attracting Attention.
In addition to drawing inspiration from the 1970 Ted Hughes poem, the new Yorke and Donwood collection also looked to the Bodleian Libraries’ collection of Islamic pirate maps and 1960s US military topographic charts. According to the exhibition’s announcement, the artwork will also feature “extensive language of signs and symbols” developed by Donwood and Yorke.
A part of the synopsis reads: “The artwork itself is closely linked with The Smile’s genesis. The band’s name is taken from Ted Hughes’s seminal poetry collection Crow, which also inspired the paintings and title of the exhibition. During the pandemic – when the public first became aware of Yorke’s new musical project – the accompanying artwork and animations that were posted with each new single became a source of speculation amongst fans, as they pored over hints and possible revelations regarding the forthcoming album.”
Elsewhere, it states: “Yorke likened the art sessions to the process of making music, saying ‘that was what I found incredibly exciting. It just stays active for so long… I became so conscious of the fact that the two processes are almost exactly the same’. Observing the similarities between music-making and art production, they have also both referred to themselves as a ‘two-piece’, working side by side and responding to each other’s work in real time.”
Notably, Yorke and Donwood have worked together since 1994. Since then, the latter has created all the artwork for Radiohead alongside their frontman and worked on all of Yorke’s other projects, including The Smile and Atoms for Peace.
In other Thom Yorke news, earlier this week, his son Noah released a new single, ‘Ceberal Key’. The track comes from the EP of the same name. Taking to his Instagram account, the younger Yorke shared the news of the record, revealing it was his “first time in a studio for my own work”.
He continued: “It was a great experience, and I am proud of the results. It has been a reflective and formative process to write and record this project for you, and I hope you enjoy it.”
