Sunday, 16 February 2014

Figurative Painting & Collage, [2013 work]

I have just completed the first in a series of new canvases, some of which I intend to put into the graduation show. The piece is a further development of the ideas I began to use in my practice last year, of combining collage with figurative painting, to create a hybrid body, in which body parts, limbs, heads & orifices are replaced with prints of found images taken from the web. Personally I find the most successful of the paintings I created in this style last year is the piece Transfat, which is shown below.

Lacking arms, with a head composed of a foghorn and industrial pipes, and with a section from a meat mincer for an anus, Transfat is an abject piece, intended to represent the mindless greed indulged in by millions of people in today's society in order to numb the pain of their existence. My intention in making this work was to mediate the rage I feel inside at the alienation which is created by our current economic system, with its insistence on profit and loss as the only measures of worth, and the personal feeling of impotency and waste I experience in my own life.
This year I have attempted to continue to work with these ideas, and to refine them further in my work. I find the combination of collage with painting works extremely well to produce a sense of abjection, because by replacing body parts with images of either everyday household items, or strange, rusted industrial machinery, it challenges notions of self-hood. If my mouth is a foghorn, and my eyes industrial pipework, am I really a complete individual?

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