Bio
Jonathan Crayford is well known as a composer and pianist, born in Lower Hutt, Wellington, in 1964. He studied classical music and learnt jazz by osmosis and formed a career scoring films while he was still young winning various awards. He also worked in radio, television and clubs. He moved to New York during the 90's and while there played with numerous musical luminaries including Groove Collective, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Afro/Cuban based ‘Mambo Macoco' as well as recording his own music. Following a meeting with Berlin artist Sigfreid Schmidt, Crayford spent some time painting T-shirts and selling them in New York.
With regard to the first series of visual works, Crayford states: "I became interested in representing the reality of one system in another - something a physicist might call a phase space and something I have termed a ‘translation'. As a musician I play lots of notes and am constantly putting different combinations of notes together. I keep wondering what a note ‘looks' like and have discovered numerous interesting ways to reveal this. The next step was to consider what rhythm and sound looks like. I wanted to see what these things really look like as if our ears were eyes or our eyes were ears - I looked to mathematics and found that numbers have many different qualities that are not described by the way we refer to them - hidden qualities that reveal colour and rhythm if notated another way."