Some Time Had Passed. I don’t know how much.

Disclaimer- Everything you see I’ve burnt in a disused barrel in one of my all-time top three favourite alleyways.

My work is concerned with storytelling particularly through the paradox of ‘doing nothing’. I look at funny, absurd human idiosyncrasies and explore this through experimental print making and skits of absurd comic human behavior. The print making is a process I engaged with due to my circumstances in the lockdown where I was unable to paint. The work deals with antithesis and how context blurs these lines. The work reflects feelings of isolation and stasis versus nostalgia and comfort stemmed from being isolated in the bedroom I had spent the first 18 years of my life. It felt as if I hadn’t moved in ten years where I was back at my desk making art. There seemed to be so much change in the world and to people’s lives, but it was as if the lockdown had put me in a time machine where the last ten years hadn’t happened. Therefore, the images depict interiors with blankets, pillows, sofas which all become synonymous with comfort and familiarity but also conversely reflect stasis melancholy and hiding. They have complete opposite feelings attached depending on context like the antithesis of going to bed and waking up. The blanket and pillow are a welcome luxury or a benign jailer. I’m exploring what people do in these environments when faced with ‘nothing’ and how objects, place, verbs, feelings, emotions change the perspective and context of ‘nothing’.

I pair these ideas with the idea of physical things and how tangibility has changed. As a visual artist we make ‘things’, but the internet has almost made them obsolete. There are an infinite number of things that exist on the internet and those infinite number of things could just as easily not exist tangibly. I wanted to use this virtual exhibition to comment on this. The fact the images exist here does not mean they exist. That is why I have burnt them all!

I hate to disappoint but I have not burnt them all. That is a joke. Instead for ‘my exhibition’ I am going to send them to people with a poem on the back of each and leave them on buses/ benches to make the work tangible. The intention is to spread them around in the opposite way to the internet. Instead of an intangible image and text being broadcast to what could be millions of people the work will be a single unique object that one or two people see. This work was an experimental process so I want to display them experimentally. I want to give them value where they become objects. Like someone keeping a shell for no reason, or picking something up because it interests them. They are effectively tangible Instagram posts. The internet is saturated with images where they lose their human value. Someone walking outside however is interested in interacting with the physical. There is joy in this whereas the internet is an infinite distraction which clouds and saturates brilliant things until they become indistinguishable soup. Found objects that tell stories are forever interesting to me as they connect you to something or someone else. They suggest a story that people can fill their own gaps and draw their own conclusions and this is what I want from this work where ideally, they can connect with people or make them smile. The larger ones I am keeping or cutting up for an animated film I am making using this printing technique about a 2d man having an identity crisis over the illusory items that his friend revers; for example, a 2d blanket which has the illusion of folds.

If you want one send your address to Hec123@rocketmail.com otherwise you might find one on a bench.