LOST GENERATION
These paintings are from my MA show. These paintings reflect on the man's ongoing addiction to war and conflict.
There is a danger in thinking that everything that needs to be said has already been said, and yet mankind’s appetite for war remains undiminished. The First World War was supposed to be the “War that ended all Wars” and yet in 2015 there were more than 30 major conflicts around the world.
Playtime
This piece juxtaposes three themes: Man’s continued fascination with war toys. Here I drew upon a recent exhibition at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry, entitled “War Games” which examines the role of war in childhood play and strategic games from the 1800s to the present day.
I was chilled by one line from the exhibition brochure “the exhibition is a delight for both adventurous little ones and the child in us all” …
The passing of time, conveyed by the evolution of the toys, but more so by the newspaper headlines from different decades of peace and war declaration.
The sense of being trapped in a never ending spiral. Here I drew upon Escher’s impossible cabinet to create a subtle a tromp l’oeil with the shelves of the toy display cabinet forming an impossible shape.
The Third of January 2015
This piece was triggered by the recent and ongoing atrocities conducted by ISIS, and specifically the execution by “fire” of the Jordanian pilot on 3rd January 2015. I wanted to create a work that spoke to this event, but without recourse to gratuitous imagery.
This piece links to Goya’s masterpiece The Third of May 1808. Using the 200-year span of elapsed time as a means of conveying the “endless” nature of conflict.
Join
Join was a mixed media evolving installation. A large “poster site” was created in the basement corridor of Coventry School of Art. Over several months’ military recruitment posters from the last 100 years were progressively overlaid onto the site. Passers-by were encouraged to respond to the work by adding graffiti, comments, defacing and adding material to the existing content.
Initially this proved fruitful.
After the last, most recent chronologically, posters were added I worked back into the piece removing layers of the poster to reveal previous iterations. Giving it a sense of time elapsing and the repeating nature of war.
These picture were posted on a public Facebook page, and will now be made into a time-lapse film.