Output details

Comic Iconoclast

This research draws an analogy between our reliance on the computer, the digital, and religious belief systems, resulting in a set of prints that used a combination of digital drawing and printmaking to create comic iconoclastic re-renderings of iconic images and objects that question the veneration of symbols that accompany intangible belief systems.

Taking as their influence contemporary cartoon and manga imagery, generic photographed imagery found on the internet (on sites such as ebay), semiotics and the stripped down graphic language of Pop, this series of prints aimed to reconstruct these visual references creating a stylistic hybridity that echoes the collaged objects within the works and creates a stage for mis-readings, mis-understandings and paradoxes in the movement between the real and representations of the real, and also in the reading of these as images as either political comment, playful montage or bathetic pauses in a cartoon narrative.

The method involved the use of silkscreen printing to both blur and illuminate the boundaries between digital production and hand production, to question the role of these mediums as metaphors for the virtual and the real and creating a pictorial dialogue that echoes the symbiotic relationships within the imagery created.

Prints from the series were exhibited in the 2012 International Print Triennial Krakow, the exhibition ‘Bite’ at the Mall Galleries London 2011,andthe Pushing Print Festival in Margate, exhibited at the Pie Factory, 2012.