Hideous, Beasts and Corpses - Ffiaidd, Bwystfilod a Chelanedd

About

Within this exhibition the artist subverts traditional representations of the body and nature toward a more unsettling portrayal of them as informed by the subconscious mind. Wherein sensual features of the human body are emphasised over those of less cultural or mental significance. This idea is inspired by how the human brain maps each part the body in scale of its sensorial significance over and above their actual scale. Likewise, in this series of sculptures and paintings the artist utilises cultural associations of colour and shape in combinations that are both familiar and unexpected. Blurring a line between appearing at once both pleasant and sinister.

The artworks consist often of symmetrical shapes and forms such as cones and cylinders beside irregular and organic shapes. Intentionally contrasting the human nature to engineer and control beside that of wild nature of the organic worlds. For this purpose, much of the work is made or informed by the mechanical process of a lathe juxtaposed by a looser expression achieved through hand carving or expressive paintwork.

These themes are explored through a series of scenes and characters loosely inspired by the biblical story of the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden. The cast of which here focuses mainly ion the symbolic motifs of a tree, a man and a woman in a landscape or a confined space. The exhibition in its entirety makes numerous visual references toward this subject and in art history, as well as others that celebrate ideas of paradise, excess and death. Such as The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, The Ambassadors by Holbein, or The Joy of Life by Matisse. Within which inventions of beauty and ugliness, wealth and knowledge, virtue and perversion are explored and celebrated as unique traits of human nature.

The title references a quote from Aristotle ‘we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses.’