Output details

Hidden Agendas. One person exhibition with catalogue, and some local reviews

The show consisted of 2 photographic installations, 6 bronzes, 5 kinetic pieces, 5 objects with text, 7 mixed media objects, 3 pairs of embroidered pyjamas, 2 large rag rug hangings, 6 large drawings and 6 short films.

This artist is more interested in what he doesn’t know than in what he does, and is particularly intrigued in the often transgressive overlap between various visual disciplines where demarcation and contention make new challenges.

The objects are from everyday domestic origins, but interventions have been made into them by the addition of e.g. lenses, kinetic movement, text, sewing or they are cast in bronze. The use of “found” objects in making art pieces presupposes that they were “lost” in the first place. The idea of “recouping the outmoded”, [Hal Foster, “Compulsive Beauty”], allows the object with artistic manipulation, to lose one identity and gain a number of others; creating layers of allegorical and symbolic meaning that reach for a fusion of creative coincidence. New narratives, perspectives, and startling re-readings of a paradoxical nature between the art object and the mundane are exposed by emphasising hidden and latent properties inherent in interior forms, and contradicting known, familiar functions.

The materials and processes employed are not defined by convention or habit, or by a hierarchy of form, but are dictated by the idea. Skills are borrowed from other crafts and technologies, and collaboration is sought from other makers whose expertise is not shared but needed. There is a mixture and collision of plastic, verbal and conceptual languages to reveal ambiguous allusions, and create situations where meaning and context slip and slide through the poetic and emotional spaces that surround us.