Altered State
This series of works were born from a combination of imagery based around ‘The Turin Shroud’, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvatore Mundi’, and the mysteries and myths of conspiracy that surround the authenticity and origin. It questions who this really is. Is it Jesus, or is it Leonardo? This set me thinking about the origin of identity and how it can take on different appearances, concealing one identity and showing another like wearing a mask, at the same time concealing nothing, but showing everything.
This manipulation stem across a period of two recent solo exhibitions; ‘my shadow sits and waits for me’ (2008) and ‘Bodylogues’ (2010), and further examined within this new set of images in this current series called ‘Altered States’. The research carried out for my solo exhibition ‘my shadow sits and waits for me’, confronted my dark counterpart, my ‘shadow’, an underlying principle in the Jungian approach to the human psyche. Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud, considered the personal unconscious (the shadow) as a separate entity and in its collective form.
Throughout this study, the images of ‘The Turin Shroud’ and Leonardo’s ‘Salvatore Mundi’, presented themselves as ‘remnants' and found themselves combined with other elements, materials and techniques that morphed and grew into a set of works that seems to haunt me, as I am constantly returning to them, re-working, adapting, turning into this ‘meta-figurative being’ for want of a better explanation.
I now consider a remarkable, rather disturbing likeness to myself, a personal ‘imago’ of these collages and my treatment of them. They are icon-like portraits, masks in themselves. The eye has become an important factor in all these works. It is the 'eye' that has become compelling, eerie, yet a familiar overseer of all things.
This manipulation stem across a period of two recent solo exhibitions; ‘my shadow sits and waits for me’ (2008) and ‘Bodylogues’ (2010), and further examined within this new set of images in this current series called ‘Altered States’. The research carried out for my solo exhibition ‘my shadow sits and waits for me’, confronted my dark counterpart, my ‘shadow’, an underlying principle in the Jungian approach to the human psyche. Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud, considered the personal unconscious (the shadow) as a separate entity and in its collective form.
Throughout this study, the images of ‘The Turin Shroud’ and Leonardo’s ‘Salvatore Mundi’, presented themselves as ‘remnants' and found themselves combined with other elements, materials and techniques that morphed and grew into a set of works that seems to haunt me, as I am constantly returning to them, re-working, adapting, turning into this ‘meta-figurative being’ for want of a better explanation.
I now consider a remarkable, rather disturbing likeness to myself, a personal ‘imago’ of these collages and my treatment of them. They are icon-like portraits, masks in themselves. The eye has become an important factor in all these works. It is the 'eye' that has become compelling, eerie, yet a familiar overseer of all things.