E17 Art Trail 2011

The theme of this year's trail is 'On your Marks' which relates to the fact that E17 is in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, one of the five boroughs connected to the 2012 London Olympics. My work looks at the contradictions between the olympian and modern life. Text below is a bit dull because I've just cut and pasted the blurb from the E17 Art Trail website but more details and pics to come soon. ..

Man Machine

The physical fluidity of the Olympic ideal is a sharp contrast to the sedentary and technology- dependent reality of contemporary life. Electronic immersion now begins earlier and increasingly dominates leisure as well as work time.

An unreflective market aggressively drives desire for products that are constantly updated in terms of form, but increasingly less in terms of actual technological substance. While assessed in the broad and usually positive terms of social and political impact, the potential negatives on the level of the individual, both physically and mentally, are largely absent from the discussion.

For this year's Art Trail, I have created an installation called Man Machine, which occupies the entire front room of my house. Featuring paintings, posters, skeletons, text and an interactive wall, it is a disturbing work that explores some of the more damaging dynamics of the contemporary mind-body-machine relationship.