Premio Combat Prize

As an artist, I engage in a conceptually motivated practice that explores the role of the modern artist and challenges the institutions and conventions that are fundamental to all artistic endeavours. While influenced by a diverse range of aesthetic, literary and philosophical sources; my practice particularly responds to Harold Bloom’s Influence Theory and the ‘burden’ of an artist’s ambiguous relationship with their precursors.

The Golden Calf is taken from my ongoing Post Modern Melancholia series, which explores the anxieties of living artists as they attempt to forge their own original artistic vision. Each work comprises a triptych of painstakingly drawn images reproduced as Serigraph prints. The works appropriate the visual language of master printmaker Albrecht Durer as an allusion to the age old Hermetic notion of the artist as a melancholic; as laid down by Cornelius Agrippa in De Occulta Philosophia and popularised by Durer’s seminal engraving, Melancholia 1(1514).
Throughout the works these aesthetic sensibilities are reinforced with Renaissance and Baroque imagery appropriated from the deep pool available in art history. These are juxtaposed with references to contemporary art practices to transforming the work into an up to date discussion of artistic frustration within the modern art establishment.
The inherent connotations in this appropriated and referential content allow me to transport the work beyond the constrains of subject matter. Taking it to a point where the interdependent relationship between artist, artwork and viewer can be questioned on a deeper conceptual level.