ARTISTS STATEMENT
I have always been drawn to the power of art both as a powerful means of
expressing ideas and at a personal level for its aesthetic ideals. This interest
first produced publicly released work in 1999 with a screen print bearing
the slogan 'Please Fasten
Your Seatbelts And Extinguish All Cigarettes, We Are Leaving The 20th Century'.
The use of 'found imagery' and the bold, simple style of this piece together
with its overtly Situationist slogan has come to characterise the majority
of my output ever since.
In my work I attempt to confront and attack the issues I see as affecting
everyday life. These aren't the typical, headline grabbing issues of the day
such as the war on terror; instead I prefer to focus on the mundane and seemingly
unimportant day-to-day decisions and actions that I see as really creating
our environment. In this I follow a very strong Situationist leaning. Combining
this with a pop-art sensibility and the overt use of the everyday language
of contemporary culture, I produce bold, attention grabbing images that are
accessible to all.
Much of my work has been in prints and paste-ups, in which I like to pair
familiar images with conflicting and often seemingly irrelevant phrases to
provoke greater reflection than an obvious or more didactic slogan would produce.
A typical example of this is the piece 'No
War For Water' produced for the Mayor of London's Climate Change exhibition
(May 2008). The piece uses the words 'No War For Water', taken of course from
the 'No War For Oil' slogan. This may at first might seem nonsensical but
hopefully it prompts the viewer ask why the phrase was deliberately changed;
this hopefully leads to further questions such as 'Could there be a war for
water?' or 'Is water scarce?' as well as broadening the war for oil debate.
I have also worked in sound and video, most notably with 'No
More Heroes', a series of single screen video installations in which I
have simply removed the 'hero' from a series of well-known Hollywood films.
This process perversely highlights the hero, prompting the viewer to questioning
the validity of a hero archetype in his or her society.
At present I am currently working within the Steal From Work artist collective
based in Bristol, both producing our own work and curating exhibitions of
contemporary & urban art. I am also a member of the neo-modern artist
group.
Motorboy, 2008
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