Over the course of two residencies in 2015, I made 10 Airbrush paintings that talked about a shared human creation myth, as a series called Selected Scenes from the Beginning Of The World.
Along with a new story that I wrote, made up of an amalgamated global cosmology, they charted the similarities between disparate societies stories and the connections that reach across humanity’s narrative.
Each one deliberately ambiguous, they tell segments of the story I collated, but much in the same way that Tarot cards allow personal interpretation and meaning to reveal itself, I wanted these to do the same.
They were intended to be shown as physical paintings, but I ended up exhibiting them as massive enlarged prints pasted on to the walls of the exhibition space.
As we look more and more at our screens I wanted to double down on the fact that these have never been shown in the flesh, as paint on paper, also reflecting the reality that I spend 99% of my time working on the computer, despite trying over the years to be as analogue as possible.
When they were painted it felt a very optimistic time for me. It was bright, simple, felt a lot more free.
We had climbed out of the crash.
It was the early days of Instagram.
Now is a darker time than then.
The knowledge and connectedness we now have feels cloying, like a cloak over everything, the hyperawareness we now all possess limits us.
The internet’s promise of free and open access by all has been upended, leading to polarisation, illness. It has connected us, but also atomised us—everything is polarised now, everything is political—there needs to be more focus on the interconnectedness of everyone’s stories and the grey areas that we all exist in, it feels like a different world to 2015.
This is a reworking of these pieces for a new time and with new knowledge and perspectives, as we now truly live in a digital age, I felt these paintings could speak to that.
I want these works to highlight the fact that the 10 original paintings lie in stasis in my studio, but could exist as 10 large format artworks online, and garner far more visibility than they ever did as physical pieces.
They are generally as simple and open in form to allow interpretation and similarities to other cultural artefacts to be drawn.
The colour has been changed in the computer, and crucially the white has been inverted to black- as a reference to the new medium—the switch has been flipped to dark UXmode—but they haven’t been altered in any structural or other means, they crucially remain scans of A1 Airbrush paintings.
They retain artefacts from the physical space, and the scanning process on purpose—dust, adhesive marks, knife marks, overspray.
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