What first interested you in becoming an artist?

 

That’s a good question; it actually forms a part of my study.  Being creative as child was a welcome break for me from the boring and difficult subjects at school.  I found reward in what I made and that reinforced a connection between art and pleasure.  As I grew older, I searched and hunted tirelessly to recreate that association but I had built up so many walls, psychological barriers, that I had become creatively blocked.  This is why I chose to study creative thinking, to try and work out what was going on in there and hopefully win the battle and regain control of my creative abilities.  The visual results from that journey can be seen in the exhibition.

 

Why Art?

 

As a child I had varied ambitions for my future, ranging from being a builder to an underwater archaeologist (which I would still love to do!).  I have identified several internal and external motivators as to why I took and persevered with a creative path, motivators such as chasing happiness, fullfilment and finding an identity.  I am however still somewhat convinced that the main catalyst was sibling rivalry. My older sister was very good at art and this frustrated me so much as I did not yet have the motor skills to compete with her in the early years, this created a strong and somewhat brat-ish desire to get as good as I could at art to be better than her.

Apparently competing with siblings is an instinct to gain a greater share of the attention and welfare from parents, thus having a better chance for survival.  First borns tend to have a ready-made use to their parents, as surrogate parents, looking after any younger children, as such the second born needs to be more creative with their efforts to gain attention.  Hence second children being much more attention seeking haha..

 

 

Can you describe a little about the exhibition?

 

The exhibition is in some respects a retrospective, it contains artworks from seminal points in my life where the environment or people around me have shaped or changed my perception of my own creative ability.

The idea began simply looking for creative blocks and how to get around them but quickly escalated into reliving and replaying large chunks of my life through the drawings, paintings or photographs associated with certain memories.  In some respects this had a cathartic effect; I was able to redirect difficult emotions associated with certain experiences to make them less painful, so they no longer had any impact upon my creative ability.

 

In any usual ‘therapy’, situation that would be great but I ended up becoming fixated with memories. The concept of false memories soon revealed itself, things that I was writing about in such crystalline detail from my memory were shown to be changed and distorted over time.  As I dug out the photographic evidence to corroborate the memories I was discussing, there were discrepancies, small things that were different, where my memories had been amalgamated with someone else’s or subtly changed along the way.

This was compounded by reading that confirmed that when we recall a memory, we only actually recall the last time we remembered that memory.  So in effect, by doing this study, I have been re-writing my entire history and although that is not something I particularly wanted to, it has become an uncontrollable side-effect of my art.

 

What can we expect to see in the exhibition?

 

The exhibition is effectively a graveyard for everything I have been told is rubbish that I have made throughout my life.  It literally is a show of drawings, paintings and photographs that people have in one way or another disparaged, vocalising their opinions clearly and thus having a profpind effect on my creative self-worth. 

There are no amazing Rembrandts here, or dead sharks in formaldehyde, there is simply a narrative shown through pictures and words, telling the tale of insecurity compounded by environment.

In terms of how it looks, there is a large variety of curios, ranging from childhood paintings,  (cringe worthy) teenage doodles, an installation, clay models, all artefacts expressing their part in the tale with accompanying literature from the study.

It is not all retrospective however, there is a progressive element whereby I explore the impact that working with and reliving memories has had upon me personally, this is expressed through some interesting printing processes.