Artist
Statement:
My practice
as an artist is based on using other people's imagery and ideologies to
create work that explores the hybridisation and blurring of the barriers
between the object and the subject. My deliberately second and third hand
sources are sampled, manipulated and then re-presented into a deliberately
schizophrenic context, in a similar manor to a hip-hop DJ mixing an eclectic
range of other people's music. My starting points are stolen, manipulated
and resold like bootleg records, drastically changing the reading of the
original sources. I am interested in using imagery that can be transplanted
and distorted in the same way a plastic surgeon would change their approach
to the same materials to cater for a range of different client's desires
and tastes.
I have a keen interest in how mechanical processes can be applied to areas
of art that are traditionally seen as strongholds of the hand made. I
use technology frequently in my studio practice to disrupt and enhance
my approaches to making work. I have recently used pigment based inkjet
prints on canvas to produce a body of work that explores the interplay
between the sublimated surface of the digital print, the subject matter
of the images (computer manipulated versions of other artist's work and
photographs of my own models) and my analogue painted interventions over
the print's surface. I am interested in exploring photographic/ print
based imagery in a manor where it can be reconstructed into an object
that is essentially a stolen cheaply copied fake but put into the context
of a bourgeois luxury object. My deliberately ambiguous finished products
raise interesting questions; has this been painted? Why has this been
painted? Why have these materials been used?
My work addresses the gulf between the image saturated media and the bespoke
handmade territory stereotypically seen to be inhabited be the garret
dwelling artist. I negate subjective and objective approaches to make
work of questionable bastardised virtue. The question that the work asks
is not so much is it possible to make new work? but rather how much can
the “ready made” of art history be striped and mined before
we are left with a self replicated mass of grey goo? How far can images,
objects and ideas be pushed? Where does a reference, become a fake, become
a commodity, become a entirely separate entity? I wish to illustrate John
Cages statement “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”,
everything has been done and exhausted, what is there left to experiment
with? In art the techniques and methods that have been developed are now
on the conveyor belt, I can feel free pick and choose the methods I like.
My art comes from the way that the disparate parts are connected.
As Susan Sontag writes " A modern artist would have to rewrite Pater`s
dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires
to the condition of photography" . This statement was made obviously
before the advent of digital media, the aspirations of art must shift
again and find itself a new niche, after MP3's and JPEG's what does art
strive for?
I have become interested in the idea of making an "expressionist"
work. I want to appropriate the romantic view of the artist and filter
it into another context. Traditional painting seems too laden with a history
that I didn't take part in, I have experienced more painting through reproduction
than in the flesh. In my recent work I have used photo-mechanical methods
of production; I like the distancing effect of using a reproduction of
a brushstroke instead of the real thing. I have also utilised a similar
device in my photos, with these pictures of brush strokes and heads I
am attempting to put the clichés of expressionist painting into
the detached context that I can deal with. There is a searching quality
in my work that comes from the awareness of coming too late to take part
in art history and at the same time the need to find a new way of creating
work.
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