Bigger Than Jesus

This painting is one of a series I made using the visual language of British satirical cartoons and the narrative space of European history painting to comment on contemporary British politics and the tendency of the political elite to colonise and recycle both troubling and transcendent aspects of our collective past. This has become more urgent in my work since the Brexit vote, as imperialistic rhetoric increasingly romanticises a past that never existed. In this piece, a Kafkaesque and nightmarish landscape is evoked. References to advertising, gathered via an archival research methodology, overlap with layers of British past and present, and the painting evokes the fever dreams of a troubled nation slipping off the edge of a continent.