Building Blocks

About

He considers himself to be both a Welsh artist and an artist of mixed nationality ' having spent the majority of his life in Wales and having learnt the language ' though he was born a stone's throw away in Birkenhead. This internal battle of nationality is significant in his work. For this show he has produced a piece called 'Broader Disputes' in which he has taken a readymade, a found dead tree that has breached and crossed the fence on which it was resting. The tree and the 'border' have become one object

As part of an ongoing socially process-driven artwork, Mike has also created a digitally manipulated triptych. The image is made up of the following: a image of graffiti on a wall in a park, a virtual tree ' inspired by the Buddhist demon Mahakala (the demon who has the power to devour time), and a mirrored image of the wall in the park which Mike 'cleaned up' using Photoshop. The resulting image was printed (2.7x0.8m) onto Foamex and reinstalled into the same park ' to let nature take its course. After two months of being out in the open, the work will be installed in the gallery come rain, hail or graffiti artist.

Mike also plans to install a mechanically driven desk ' which makes a lot of noise and movement but does not actually do anything or shows any evidence of ownership, making associations to the paper work involved in our daily grind and lack of ownership of the desk in modern offices, i.e. 'hot desking'. The desk is made up of various 'bits and bobs' giving the appearance of a mechanical version of Dada (anti art) assemblage artist Kurt Schwitters.

Other pieces include 3D computer animated trees, which have been hyper-manipulated so that they lose any resemblance to their natural starting points. Mikes work is a combination of several elements but at its core a meandering sense of rootlessness and of the parallel paths of the natural and the man made.