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Aerial Jetty

Fine Art Society London

A sequence of 14 works explored the use of standard gaming background matrixes to establish compressed pictorial space, from which specific components were detached to create a degree of illusion and mass. Traditions of painting and drawing were deliberately conflated with those of computer screen graphics, and precedents lay more within virtual than pictorial space, although process and medium were developed over ten years, with no overt precursors. A research book of images from the second Iraq war provided source material.

The work considers Sixsmith and Murray’s phenomenological account of the experience of virtual reality applications and the contention that VR “brings embodiment with it” (The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality, Ethos, 27 (3), 1999: 315-343).

Launch (aluminium) established the mode of inquiry, with oblique references to virtual Kendo battle games. Aerial jetty (5’ x 7’, aluminium) deploys a gravity-free composition, removing the need for a conventional horizon. Further metaphors in the exhibition included flight/falling and ascending/descending. Four works on paper explored ideas of repetition-in-violence, referencing media images collected from the second Iraq war: a ‘WMD’ plant, a helicopter landing, a bombing run in Baghdad. These more documentary images countered (across the gallery space) the ‘war-game’ appearance of three larger works, cross-referencing Baudrillard in questioning the representation of war.

The solo exhibition continued a series in which an experimental method reconsiders the broader relationship between painting and drawing, and between drawing and photography. Works were selected from 40+ images, representing two years work, including discarded experiments that had defined the research direction. Studio visit and an interview with gallery curator Toby Clarke refined the selection of work, and informed his catalogue text.