A Load Of Bunglesome Paraphernalia
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While studying painting at the Slade School of Fine Art I discovered the joy of painting on large canvases and, simultaneously became fascinated by techniques of modern music production – which began to influence my work. After I graduated from The Slade, I worked in a collective of artists making music, curating shows, Djing and producing T shirt designs. Having recently returned from a Pacific sailing expedition I now live in the North of England where I am a member of a printmaking group and make electronic music under the moniker ‘Spooneatingrobot’.
My work is informed by the personality of everyday objects. Through a playful process of sampling and automatic drawing I combine elements of vegetation, science fiction, furniture, architecture, vehicles and other stuff to create characters and forms with absurd and comic tendencies. Continual invention and humour is important to me and I enjoy the challenge of creating new characters based on a loose set of rules.
I tend to work on scraps of paper and post it notes, producing drawings which I then store away in a cardboard box. This functions as a databse of ideas that I later refer to when creating new paintings.
I paint in acrylics on canvas of various sizes. Some pieces are a direct translation of one of my drawings. The most interesting works for me are those which I fill with many individually painted characters. Sometimes selecting drawings at random the paintings develop organically and the narrative of interactions is often enjoyable and surprising. Working from left to right and down the canvas, flattening perspective and giving each character its own space suggests written information or pictograms.
As well as using finished drawings to create a painting I am also interested in using elements from my drawings as inspiration – lines, scratches and half forms. These pieces, or microsamples, I think of as quantum soup, packets of information, genes or tiny building blocks of unlimited potential.
I am currently exploring these ideas in screenprinting, and also working on a collaborative painting project whilst continuing my interest in music by ‘remixing’ a painting where each element is reworked and recombined to produce a new piece or ‘edit’.