Adam Knight

Artist Statement

The work is developed and realised through meticulous and repetitive processes. The creative process is gradually replaced by the monotonous method of making a piece of work. The confinement and the intimidation of the page have led to a body of work investigating my own relationship to how I make work; including the traditional, difficult confrontation the artist has with the surface. I am exploring the space where the work is made and the ambiguities between the studio and the office environment. I am interested in the materiality of making objects within a limited resource common to both locations, how this subverts my artistic practice as well as the office situation. The act of punching a hole in a piece of paper is both constructive and destructive, neither the paper nor the hole takes precedence, thereby questioning the fundamentals of what is work and what is not. The hole-punching relates directly to embossing, where the press directly impacts onto the surface. The work remains in a dialogue with printmaking and its traditional industrial associations.

I make three dimensional objects that manipulate scale; I am interested in making something that is not monumental but larger than life, whilst still retaining a basic element of function. The modern virtual office denies its worker the opportunity for creating something tangible and physical. The digital images exist in this absent world as something banal and alluring, produced in front of a flickering monitor. The long drawn-out process of making these images imitates the relationship many people have with their computers as a necessary way of making a living. The digital images are drawn from photographs that manipulate reality - veering from the real to the abstract to the artificial spaces that so many find themselves within.

The work is my reaction to the frustration of being placed into the office and studio environment, the strange experience of working within an institution that has the same obsessive hierarchy as the office. Inside the mundane there exists the possibility for humour and irony.

Adam Knight