Post Modern Melancholia

I engage in a conceptually motivated practice that explores our perception of ‘value’ in a secular, post-religiocentric world and the role of the artist within that society.

Drawing on the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky concerning the re evaluation of values in the face of the ‘death of God’. My current Post Modern Melancholia series explores the anxieties of living artists as they attempt to forge an original artistic vision; particularly responding to Harold Bloom’s Influence Theory and the idea an artist creating under the ‘burden’ of all their precursors colossal achievements. Each work comprises a triptych of intricately hand drawn compositions, recreated through screen printing at epic scales.

I appropriate the visual language of printmaker Albrecht Durer and other renaissance artists as an allusion to the age-old Hermetic notion of the artist as a melancholic; a theme reintroduced from antiquity by Cornelius Agrippa in his De Occulta Philosophia and popularised by Durer’s seminal engraving, Melancholia 1(1514).

Heavily inspired by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; each composition is layered with allusions to Renaissance and Baroque artworks as though the rubble of Western art history is being reassembled to convey something meaningful. These are then juxtaposed with references to contemporary art practices to further transform the work into an up to date discussion of artistic frustration within the fragmentation that is characteristic of the modern world.