Statement
The dynamics between material actuality and the illusion of images within our technological present is the subject of my work.
We exist in a state of constant flux. Forces interact continually to create physical, intellectual, and cultural structures that often dissipate as quickly as they develop. Instability, uncertainty and increasing speed have become norms but the sustainability of material states has raised questions that are full of doubt. The terms ‘nature’ or ‘natural’, including ‘human nature’, have become problematic and need to be rethought, indeed, the term ‘alive’ has become complex as the ‘synthetic’ has been increasingly embraced and celebrated. However, forces beyond human agency continue to be devalued or simply disregarded. The ‘physical’ is repeatedly ignored in the construction of our imaginative models and calculations.
Our symbolic and imagined models of ‘what might be’ have always been virtual but technological innovations have made this fundamental condition more visible. The increased potentials for exaggeration and manipulation have been seized upon, profoundly changing value systems, notions of knowledge and behaviours. Often, the virtual seems at odds with and preferred to, embodied experience while definitions of boundaries and self have become more uncertain. The personal sense of a lived moment has become undermined as the individual has evaporated into ‘useful’ data and quantity has replaced the unique. Individual images exist for a fleeting moment, merging into others almost before they form. Images scroll before us continually to become a surface of the perpetually new, hiding as much as it reveals. These changes have only increased the separation and distance between our illusionary images and material states which will create new dynamics going forward.
As a painter, I want to find a way of working that addresses these issues. I have always been uncomfortable with the idealised vacuum of the pristine canvas whose defined edges seem to exclude the materiality of everyday life. Consequently, I prefer to work with three dimensional grounds that are constructed from discarded objects, found by chance in my local environments. Fragments of ‘natural’ forms are included but most of the objects are man-made, redundant and damaged. Glimpses of the inherent histories and identities of some objects remain in the final work but collectively, their physical structures always contribute towards the painting’s emergent form and surface. Individual painted marks are records of single moments, actions and decisions but collectively, rather than alluding to the literal body, the marks accumulate to become an intersubjective and intercorporeal ‘flesh’ that reflects a form of what and how we might ‘know’ now.