About my work
I wish to make work which attaches itself to reality and reaches out into its environment, whilst also embracing the immaterial, the invisible and the mysterious.
The basis or inspiration for my work comes either from the built environment or travel brochures. So it’s both the mundanity of the modern office cell or the images which provoke wonder and longing, of tropical idylls in the pages of Winter Sun.
The whiteboard drawing obscures reality. The places depicted are idealised and unreachable. Like the “eventless” advertisement which declares its own meaninglessness we are promised something through the image, we look past it and daydream, drawing on our own fantasies. The whiteboard shows the fragility and impermanence of both itself and of the dreams that we buy into.
Sotnikov said “The creation of projects, the formulation of all kinds of Utopias, is immanently inherent in us, in our consciousness, and furthermore it rests as a stimulus and as a basis for any of our actions as long as we remain human beings. In other words we can exist only in the mode of the creation and realisation of Utopias, no matter what they might turn out to be “in actual fact”.
The paramount film company logo features in many of my drawings. It could be seen to point to Utopia, an otherworldly, mystical place. Instead the logo reveals a sense of artificiality, reducing nature to a garish commercial sign. Perhaps a metaphor for our technological dislocation from reality.
Monuments. I’m interested in the way that forms become invisible through their monumentality and stasis e.g. statues, memorials, totalising forms which rid their subject of life in the present. In contrast with work that is performative, tied to the present in its refusal to close or “turn to stone”. I’m interested in the power of objects which are themselves relatively immaterial, which one looks through or past.
Main artist Influences:
Dan Flavin, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Roni Horn, Runa Islam, Donald Judd, Edouard Manet, Robert Morris, Tony Oursler, Sigmar Polke, Jeff Wall, Mark Wallinger, Catherine Yass, Edwin Zwakman.
Favourite art theorists/writers:
Jean Baudrillard, Norman Bryson, Jacques Derrida, Mick Finch, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Rosalind Krauss, Calvin Seerveld, Susan Sontag, Paul Virilio, Nicholas Wolterstorff.
