Premio Combat Prize

My paintings begin as a dialogue, both with a particular Folk Tale and also with an image from art history – often a painting by an Old Master that may then be used as a starting point from which to playfully but reverently deviate. I am interested in how stories are retold and re-imagined, and how the retelling alters and embellishes the original even as it seeks to render it vital and alive once again for a new audience. Along with this concern comes a question of how modern developments may be balanced by a dialogue with established traditions and past narratives, and yet not become nostalgic. Whereas in the past, the artist or thinker had the shared symbolic order provided by religion within which to refer and ground their work, the artist today must find a way of surviving the bewildering plurality and subjectivity that has become the norm, if what they have to say is to maintain any force or credibility.
My work has been through a number of changes over the past two years in particular. Previously I would make use of a pre existing image as a starting point, from which several coloured photocopies were made. This image would then be deconstructed and rearranged using scissors and glue, and then reconstructed to form something that had a new life, with its own particular, but connected narrative. This collage would then form the basis for a painting, which was made predominantly using acrylic on linen.

These works were often made in two or three sittings, and there was an attempt to apply the paint in a concentrated, semi conscious way in order to try to get myself as much out of the way as possible as the work was being made. Inevitably this strategy failed spectacularly, and I was often left tinkering and fiddling with areas of the work to add detail and tease out a form that had been recognised and demanded to be attended to. The works were theatrical and melodramatic, and this became something that I grew to enjoy about them, perhaps because it was something that I had not anticipated or lay completely within my control. The sheer enjoyment of making these works was not intended to be an exercise in grand, expressionistic gestures, but was rather an attempt to transform and renew the subject through the act of making.

Peter Fuller talks about how, in the past the artist could ‘transform the physically perceived by the manifestation of allegoric devices like haloes and ‘human’ wings, whereas now this can only be realized through the transfiguration of formal means like drawing, colour and touch’ . The act of making becomes inseparable from the message that is being conveyed through the marks, one of the importance of a vital, living dialogue with the past. The intention was to frustrate the process of recognition through treading a path that played between the borders of figuration and abstraction, and thus slowed down the viewer by creating a space for sensation to emerge.

More recently, although the concerns of the work have remained constant, that is, the desire to retell and re-imagine what is past, and in so doing, to enable it to live again in vital and unexpected ways, the means have altered. The works are now predominantly oils on board, and are constructed without a conscious reference to past imagery. Instead they are perhaps more linked to the narratives and stories that I encounter during my work as an Art Psychotherapist with teenagers, many of whom have tales of neglect and abuse. These stories have very little trouble attaching themselves to the Folk Tales and Faery Stories that I have always been interested in, since the themes of the two; loss and abandonment, the violence of parental figures, oral greed, transformation and renewal, naturally merge into each other.

Paint is now poured and manipulated to create areas of thick and crusted surfaces, that are allowed to wrinkle and pock mark as the various mediums used dry out. Once this process has reached a certain point, the image is again finely adjusted to create areas of shadow and recession, to a point where a form may begin to emerge, but hopefully not too much. The pause button is then pressed, to hopefully allow something to sit forever on the cusp of becoming – neither an abstract blob of raw sienna nor the fold of flesh in a stomach, but both, and neither. I want my works to be sensuously addictive, worldly and material, yet also to have a sense of contemplative silence akin to a religious icon. This ability to be in two worlds at once, the past and the present, the abstract and the figurative, the imagined and the real, is what interest me and sustains me as an artist, and is the reason that I continue to make paintings.
I currently work as an artist in residence and Art Psychotherapist at Trinity High School in Manchester.
Solo exhibitions
2018 - Iain Andrews - House of the Nobleman, London
2015 - Changeling - York College Gallery, York
2014 - Re:view - Iain Andrews, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
2013 - Il teatro dei leviatano - Man and Eve, London ,
- The Language of Paint (with Richard Kenton Webb), Atkinson Gallery, Somerset
2012 - Mythopoeia, Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, Warrington
2011 - Manchester Contemporary, Man and Eve , Manchester
2009 - The Pilgrimage of Lost Children and Other Stories, Bankley Mill, Manchester ,
- Theoria, Gallery 286, London
1999 - Passion, The Crossing, St Paul’s, Walsall, West Midlands
Group exhibitions
2018 ’Fresh paint’, Messums Gallery, Wiltshire, ’Material Earth - Myth, material and Metamorphosis ’, Messums Gallery, Wiltshire, ’Chaiya Art Award’ - Oxo Gallery, London
2017 ‘Testcard P’, St Marylebone Crypt, London, ‘Bankley Open’ , Bankley Gallery, Manchester, ‘Mardi gras Requiem’, Project Space Plus, University of Lincoln, ‘Contemporary British Painting’, Yantai Art Museum, Yantai and touring to Artali Gallery, Nanjing and Jiangsu Art Museum, Nanjing, ‘Strange Little Things’, Bankley Gallery, Manchester – ‘GMCC Art Prizewinners exhibition’, Chamber of Commerce, Manchester –‘Antennae’, Lubomirov Angus Hughes, London
2016 ‘Correspond’, Artworks, Halifax and touring to London, Liverpool, Rye and Winchester, ’Sixty’ - Lubomirov Angus- Hughes, London, ’Anthology’ - Van der Plas Gallery, New York, New Work, Manchester Contemporary, Telling Tales, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London, Miniature World, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 30x30x43, St Marylebone Crypt, London
2015 - How the Light gets in, The Globe, Hay on Wye, - Bankley Open, Bankley Gallery, Manchester, - National Open Art Competition, Royal College of Art, London
2014 - (DETAIL) H Project Space, Bangkok (June) and Transition Gallery, London (September) Curator Andrew Bracey, - Open up North, Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, - Bankely Open, Bankley Gallery, Manchester
2013 - Beautiful Things, next door projects, Tate Liverpool, - The Tip of the Iceberg, Contemporary Art Society, London
2012 - 60 Drawings, Bankley Gallery, Manchester , - A Private Affair, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston , - Collectible, Zeitgeist Arts Projects, London, - Digital Romantics, Dean Clough Gallery, Halifax, - International Beethoven Project, National Pastime Theatre, Chicago, - Manchester Contemporary , (with man & eve), Manchester, - Polemically Small, Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, - Pulse (with Man and Eve), New York, NY, - Put your money where your eyes are, Fundraising Auction for Castlefield Gallery, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, - The Wreck of the Imagination, Sarah O’Kane Fine Art, Lewes
2011 - Art Works Open, Barbican Arts Group, London, - Configured, Signal Gallery, London, - Contemporary Approaches to Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London, - Deptford X, Core Gallery, London, - Desire, Portman Gallery, Soho, London, - Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London, - National Open Art Competition, Pallant House, Chichester, - Polemically Small (curated by Edward Lucie Smith), Garboushian Gallery, Los Angeles, - The Open West, Gloucester Art Gallery, Gloucester, - The Return - House of the Nobleman, Boswall House, Regents Park, London, - We are all in this together, Bureau Gallery, Manchester