Divine Masculine Divine Feminine
Oil, acrylic, calico and collage on canvas
190x480cm (full) 190x160cm (individually)
Started at the beginning of lockdown and put on hold due to the impracticality of its size and the loss of access to a studio, the work was completed between October 2022 and January 2023.
The canvas has been built up with collage and elements painted from second-hand imagery selected for its blatant consumerist propaganda. The aspirational is paired with images of violence and perversion, with the intention of questioning the capitalist system, gender roles under patriarchy and the destruction of the environment. An apocalyptic feeling pervades the work, a reflection of the feeling amongst young people today when faced with the prospect of the future. The imagery bombards the viewer in the way we are now bombarded with imagery via social media, the internet and advertising. The visual language constantly changes across the piece, echoing the disparate formats of imagery we are faced with every day. The work explores themes of masculinity and femininity; aspects created socially and present physiologically. It explores psychoanalytic ideas of gender, the phallus and the sex/death drive as well as Bataille’s theories of limit experiences and eroticism. It is a personal exploration of my psyche and my interactions with and understanding of men and women in my life.
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Relief
Oil, acrylic, calico and collage on canvas
190x480cm (full) 190x160cm (individually)
Individual Titles (left to right):
Relational Entanglement
Post-Mortem
As Above, So Below
This is the first oil painting I made with a process of not planning, but cutting out shapes of painted calico and glueing them onto the canvas, then glueing paper on top, then painting individual figures or scenes one by one as I came across them in my box of collage clippings. The spontaneity of this process helped me avoid the preplanning that often leads to a composition of horizontals and verticals that felt quite awkward. Prior to this, I had been making collages with this process, but not paintings, and there was a disconnect between the two that needed addressing.
The imagery makes subtle references to issues I think about a lot and am interested in, such as anxieties of modern living, the impact of technology, psychoanalysis and layers of consciousness, how governments deal with crises like health scares (this was prior to covid19), death, religion, the paranormal, violence, and conspiracy theories. There are a lot of ideas going on in it, as there are lots of thoughts and interests going on in my mind, and I think this reflects how my generation feels: bombarded with information, all very dramatic and all contradicting each other.
My research into conspiracy theories forms a large source of inspiration for this work; however, there are bigger messages being put across in this work, and if there were one overarching theme, it would be the influence of the internet. For most young people and many older people, it is the main source of information, but a place that is at war with itself constantly and is full of false information that masquerades as the truth. Websites also rely on clicks to get revenue, so the internet is full of dramatic and intense content, sexual, violent and inflammatory. This kind of imagery fills your head when you spend enough time on the internet, and the paintings are a result of that.
I am always acutely aware that painting is an ancient medium, and I often wonder about its relevance in a digital society and question why I still paint, so subverting the traditions of painting (whether formally or via the imagery I depict) is a way for me to explore that.
This piece also explores space and depth. Another conversation about the relevance of painting was the Greenbergian argument for abstraction to embrace the flatness of painting and do away with illusionistic depth. I was very interested in the Jasper Johns Bathtub series of paintings of a real 3d space, but seen with a head-on view of a flat wall with flat posters on it and then right in the middle, an illusionistic nail protruding from the wall with a shadow. He was playing both games, flatness and depth. This painting collages areas of depth and areas of flatness; they overlap and intersect in ways that don’t make sense in a consistent way, and there is a mix of different spaces. This is where the name Relief comes from; it’s partly a comment on relief sculpture, which is both three-dimensional and flat, and partly a sarcastic use of a word that is opposite to the feeling we experienced when faced with any of the topics in the painting.
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