Artist
Statement
I am an artist who operates out of a self-built plywood darkroom studio/laboratory, by Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. I work with hand-processed super 8mm cine film, 35mm slides, and photographs, with watercolor and other experimental post-production techniques; as well as text and performance. I was born in Hull, a former North Sea Fishing city in Yorkshire, England, and am a professional sailor working with having sailed since I was 10 years old.
I find myself perpetually hauled towards the maritime – its myths and its abyss. My work centers around a seriously-silly juxtaposing of various ‘sublimes’ against their questionable-opposites. Such explorations have included: the boundless and the miniature, the wild and the domestic, romanticism and modernity, the chaotic and the rational, the horrific and the daft.
The sublime that concerns me is not to be found in modernist notions of mass industry or postmodernist notions of digital technology but rather the pre-modernist natural sublime of the Romantic era; a concept of the sublime that embodies a wild resistance to modernity, capital, urban alienation, rationalism, human supremacist ideology, and civilization itself. Yet the sublime, as a compulsion away from rational autonomy towards awe/subservience can also be utilised for politically problematic ends (see Nazi architect Albert Speer’s 'Cathedral of Light').
These tensions are explored through a partially self-deprecating humour that questions the status assigned by art and in particular romanticism to the bourgeois European male artist. As Stewart Home writes, “Bourgeois wimmin whose behaviour resembles that of the ‘male genius’ are dismissed as being ‘hysterical’ - while proletarians of either sex who behave in such a manner are simply branded as ‘mental’” (The Assault on Culture, p. 4).
Thus in my work I half-embody a character: an artist-adventurer whose search for the sublime often ends in ridiculous peril and near death. This performative aspect of the work aims to carve a space for a ’proletarian sublime’ in the radical English working-class tradition of bottom-up satire.
I remain fascinated by the legend of Turner, whom I consider the first performance artist – with his tying of himself to a ship in a thunderstorm, painting in blizzards, as well as his use of artwork titles to stress location/process & tease the art elite (e.g: “The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich" - exhibited 1842).
I am interested in analogue film & photography as mediums that simultaneously supplanted and revolutionised paint, freeing it from the shackles of utility. In turn, I am interested in how analogue film & photography sit in a digital age, finding themselves like paint; sufficiently outmoded for experimental revisiting.
If it took the great philosopher Edmund Burke to elucidate the sublime in a comparison between the wild wolf and the domestic dog, it took the even greater children’s novelist Jack London to show us the process whereby Buck becomes wild again. Likewise, rather than existing as a series of static objects/certainties, my work accentuates process: shooting Super 8mm on a frozen lake, watercoloring whilst sailing in a thunderstorm (one of many nods to Turner), capturing a wave on a 35mm slide (only to have the wave capture me); followed by Frankensteinian experiments in darkroom development/post-development. All my voyages end in mishap and from those shipwrecks come these artefacts.
