Premio Combat Prize

€About Ian Wolter
Ian Wolter is based in London and Cambridge and graduated as a mature student in Fine Art at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, in 2015.
Winner of the Global Sustainability Institute Art Prize 2015 and most recently the Arte Laguna Prize 2016, his work has generated headlines nationally and internationally, and continues to probe the boundaries between politics, art and community.
Ian is fascinated by lying and liars, and by those who connive to put their own interests ahead of society’s. He is also interested by the ways in which people edit their personal past, memories and justifications; to make them fit their self-image or reputation. His new experimental works are sculptural and kinetic carriers of political messages. By seeking to make ‘solid’ or ‘permanent’ sculpture from industrial fluids, powders and unctuous waxes or petroleum jellies, he is led to create machines, with very human, ethical messages.
‘The Ectoplasm of Self-Delusion’
The work comprises two columns of plinth mounted male busts. The plinths appear to be industrial, made of steel and motorised; and the towers of heads they support are either rising from, or sinking into deep Vaseline within them. This subversion of the conventional bust and plinth is a repeating theme for the artist who uses it to comment on social hierarchies, perceived orders and the allure they hold for those who sit at the top of them.