I was brought up in a Christian (evangelical) home where one had to accept the teachings of the bible as gospel; questioning the faith was prohibited. This negativity did it violence; they tore the teachings out of context and in doing so delimited philosophical dialectics. I am now consistently self-reflexive on what I think about these things and life in general. It was this delimiting, destructive, un-questioning attitude that encourages me to question my own ontological position in relation with certain life-truth procedures. It is this self-reflexivity and criticality that has navigated me into the reading of philosophy, politics and the practice of making art.
Graduating from my masters I went through, what can be called, a dilemma; how could I extend my interests in conceptual and minimalist aesthetics, but still be able to evade the possibility of burying myself in an overtly academic artistic practice. I wanted to move back to representational art, but start from a whole new position; to create a new realism, operating in a reductionist aesthetic, based on social reality.
Social Realism as creative repetition: The paintings focus on observations of daily life, my surroundings. For me at certain moments: when making my bed, walking around in public spaces, noticing rubbish scattered around, picking up the kids from school, surfing the internet, and watching question time, that I think, yes, this is life; the banal existence within the every day. This is what I know, and so this is what I want to paint, to focus directly with life and my quotidian surroundings. Using my mobile phone with a built in camera I am able to take hundreds of instant photographs of my surroundings as documentation, which becomes possible source material for my paintings. I don’t make photorealist paintings as this is not my concern, but by using the digital photographic image I am able to get to reality, my everyday reality, realism as a truth procedure - the photograph gives me an objective account of social truths (in terms of visibility) as an image. How does one make social realist art?
How do I paint social reality? What is my role as an artist within my community? Is it possible for me to make social realist painting in today’s political and economic climate?
Why social realism as creative repetition? It could be argued that in todays political and economical climate, where governments are imposing draconian fiscal austerity on the working classes, is a good time to make art that is reflexive of the ordinary, everyday citizen. I would argue that this hypothesis is made possible today because of the current description given to this by Mark Fisher as ‘capitalist realism.’ I work into the early hours of the morning; lost within my solitary self, within the shadows of my domestic space making paintings or watching ‘kitchen sink’ films or reading politics and philosophy books. It is from this corner of the world that I consider the questions and issues that affect me (us) as a thinking, political and social being. It’s my relationship with both the public spaces and domestic space that interests me, the vulnerability of being in public and then the safety of being back home (the shell - my corner of the world) and its back in this space that I make art and read. The idea of a separation between work, spare time and freedom has become blur, a paradox, where a slippage has developed within my practice.
7 Pitchford st
Stratford
e15 4rz
London
London
United Kingdom
Europe
