Organic by Means of the Synthetic
Our contemporary Western lifestyle is full of tensions and ironies. Personal desires and ideologies often clash with socially accepted customs and moralities. . Our actions often cause us harm both on a personal level and through society as a whole. Indeed the fact that the sociopolitical and environmental ramifications of our petroleum-based consumer driven society are reaching a head right now is apparent. Whilst living here in this ‘new world’, in this lap of luxury so to speak, we are faced with the threat of imminent annihilation, either from terrorism, ecologically or more recently economically. That these opposing concepts can be held concurrently in our collective social consciousness is something that I find fascinating and it from this paradox and others that my recent work has sprung.
Using contemporary industrial and synthetic materials I want my work to be both a reflection of this consumer society and a portal into debates that affect the human experience, which are more timeless and numinous than simple politics. I am interested in what governs our actions-is it nature versus nurture or is it all simply just nature- and where we turn to seek the help we need to be saved from ourselves when it goes wrong? Is it God or science or do we look to our pop culture symbolism like Batman for these moral pointers. I want my pieces to allude to the organic, to natural phenomena whilst at the same time being imbued with a sense of the sophisticated and artifice, perhaps hinting that they could have been made in a factory like some domestic plastic product. I want my work to hint at irony, but not necessarily be ironic. Overall I celebrate this culture whilst acknowledging it’s faults and ultimately I feel I want to imbue my work with a sense of optimism.