A Drowned World 2018 Dimensions Variable. Paper, Wax, UV Paint, Silicone, Perspex, Sound
Victoria College of the Arts – Riding Hall. Photography Simon Strong.
‘A Drowned World’
My artworks utilise a skilled knowledge of material manipulation, taking common materials to move them through a studied practice of transformation. Scale, surface and form interplay to create a focus on materiality and formal relationships. The final installed works from ‘A Drowned World’ imitate a constellation of open readings, bodies, beings, material entities that the viewer can interpret and create a field of possible narratives. This field of bodily objects with psychotropic painted skins references mineral, biological and synthetic values. A type of psychic landscape, infused with energies of attraction and repulsion, absurdity and play.
For this series my focus was to invent and mimic processes of body morphology through various material and immaterial means. Threaded through most of my investigation was a concept of disembodiment. This followed a narrative based on my own sense of displacement, alongside a broader one of the displaced body struggling to reconcile its intrinsic relationship to the broader political and ecological implications of our time.
Christopher Cox has noted ‘that we are now fusions of flesh and machine, wetware and software… we are akin not only to animals but also to vegetables and minerals’. (1) It is undeniable that the evolution of philosophical thinking with its consideration for the body as material and matter, influenced ecologically and influencing ecological states and futures, is an acknowledgement of the precarious nature of our interwoven existence.
The matter of flesh and how it webs itself to form is under consideration within many vital philosophical treaties thus breaking down an essentialist view of nature. So that now we can see matter as a vast continuum, a field of virtual forces and intensities, thresholds and powers that, under particular conditions, is actualized in the things and bodies we know. (2)
(1) Thompson, Nato, and Christoph Cox. Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom. MIT Press, 2005. ‘Of humans, animals and monsters’ (pg 18)
(2) Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
