In the Garden of Earthly Delights: Or if Hieronymus Bosch had Instagram
The uncanny, dysmorphic and anthropomorphic forms in Sapiens, An unreliable culture of images, Still Life, Sophos and Nuclear Love take a wry look at our ocular, online culture.
The title of the series reference the mysteriously prurient world depicted in the Bosch painting In the Garden of Earthly Delights and the paintings explore the normative influence of Instagram in the context of visual and material culture
Pet Dam exhibition
I was invited to create a series of 5 paintings for a touring group show (Pet Dam) which opened in Ljubljana in December 2018.
The show travelled to Kibla Gallerija, Maribor and finally to Mestna Galerija, Nova Gorica in January 2019.
In the Garden of Earthly delights:
The large scale paintings I made for the Pet Dam exhibition developed a much smaller scale piece I made in 2015 entitled, In the Garden of Earthly delights: Or if Bosch read the Metro.
In 2015 I was commuting across London to teach at two colleges in London.
Or if Bosch read the Metro, 2015
I collected discarded magazines, newspapers and the Metro left on trains for one week and made collages out of the material which I then painted. The London underground sometimes felt like a netherworld, so it seemed apt to reference the hellish monsters in Hieronymus Bosch’s work ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’.
I was struck by just how many people read the Metro or the Evening Standard on their daily commute. To consider the vast quantities of paper used and the extremely short shelf life of the contents.
At the time it seemed like the proliferation of these two free magazines was creating a news monopoly.
This monopoly reinforced seemingly unchallengeable narratives that were Xenophobic, racist, patriarchal and ableist.
I was concerned about how these papers constituted ‘the news’ for many student. My series of paintings explore and question how and where we absorb our influences from.
