My recent work is based on pleasure and pain. These hybrid images are inspired by Eastern philosophy and Western psychology: the Buddhist contention that desire is the cause of suffering, and the Freudian contention that unresolved Oedipal desires cause the "narcissistic scar".
The scar is a compelling image. It has the connotation of permanence, yet it is evidence of the past. It has a medical identification as well as an association of torture. It is the stigmata on the body of science, the new religion we have put our faith in.
Internal/external, life/death, desire/suffering, these contradictory concepts are juxtaposed in my work as they are in life. Our desire for life can sometimes invite worse suffering. The cure is sometimes worse than the illness. Our desire for pleasure can, like a cruel joke takes us down the road to disaster. It is this tragic irony that inspires me to use S/M, drug addiction, medical torture and religious martyrdom as subjects in my work.
In the nature of abstract expressionism I use subtle abstract images to evoke emotions, ideas and memories. This engages the conscious with the subconscious and so communicates these concepts as actual experience. Thus the process of creating art and viewing art are inexorably bound. It is the irony of integrating opposites that intrigues me, and why it is apparent on so many levels in my work.
STATEMENT
"The Offspring of Eros & Thanatos".
Eros & Thanatos refer to Freud’s conviction that people possess conflicting life forces, love and death. In Greek mythology Eros was the son of Athena the goddess of love, and thanatos means death in Greek. "The Offspring of Eros & Thanatos" is an installation of 16 collaged drawings that have been inspired by relationships that can not separate themselves from love and death.
These hybrid images chronicle the body through it’s own language of pleasure and pain. Sex is the symbol of pleasure and scars and other medical imagery are a metaphor for merging and loss or fear and pain. By depicting scars as barb wire fence, it poetically describes modern man’s perception of connection through ownership and exclusion.
