Your work feels so contemporary and almost futuristic yet has such a focus on classical techniques.
how do you start interacting with such different approaches in one practice? 

​I think I was always interested in classical form, the way the old masters would use a body to create a sense of suspense.
My interest in the body originally came from experiences such as surfing or dance that connect the movement of the body to a sense of personal significance. I wanted to learn how to depict these emotive sensations through the transformation of bodily form, which drew me towards the chiaroscuro techniques of the old masters.

This approach to me was originally a rebuffal of the more commodified elements of contemporary culture. Moving from a coastal town to an epicenter of commercialism – London – I noticed a difference in the way people lived. Lived experience seemed more detached from my ideal of embodiment, more infiltrated by consumer culture.

However – particularly over the last year - as spending time online became more than just a secondary part of life, I started to want to include the experience of the digital and mediated within my work. I wanted to illustrate the rhythms and contradictions of contemporary life.

I feel that the experience of the sublime - loss of control in the face of something greater, or the boundary of self and knowledge –, and its representation the use of light and dissolution of form, links these different approaches together. This relates both to my personal interest activities that allow that kind of border experience, historical art that often depicts encounters with some kind of higher force – referenced in the use of chiaroscuro -, and the engagement with technological systems too vast to comprehend in their totality, - referenced in the manipulation and serialisation of the subject matter.

The portraits don't have as much melancholy in them

​No, in the figure paintings the bodies are in-between the physical and digital worlds – they’re more autobiographical. The portraits draw on advertising images and techniques, like the advertising smile. In these works, I’m interested to explore the dissonance between real emotion, and the way emotion is deployed in advertising & social media. They’re about how human emotion and attention is manipulated within attention-based capitalism.

So while there is a sense of searching within their environment in the figure paintings, the portraits are fully absorbed within their consumerist existence. There’s no sense of loss or hope.

Which feels very contemporary, I think a lot of people are fully absolved in that digital space today.

​Exactly. Think about the way we give away our data, information about ourselves, which is really just us. It all gets dispersed across the internet and different forces are always trying to get at it to figure out what you like and send it back at you. We have become so distracted looking at these things and it's not really an active, independent choice we’ve made. Of course humans have always been subject to outside forces such as religion, but the covertness of contemporary power structures is different. Instead of conforming to a grand narrative, we each have a personal narrative created around us – an echo chamber – and as a result contemporary experience often feels more segmented and individuated.

There is the positive side which is the ability to create online communities, engage within interests across borders. There is agency within it but it gets distorted within feedback loops. You become it and it becomes you, if you get to the end of your life and you’ve spent a certain amount of time doing something, then that is a big part of you. Just in the same way doing something meaningful with your time would feel like a part of your identity, the endless scrolling and consuming also is, yet most of us wouldn’t define ourselves by it.

Does that make you conscious of how you interact with it?

​In a way, but we are all aware that we are subject to these influences and yet we maintain insistence on individual expression and individuality. It’s a funny paradox. yet we still do it and we can’t escape from it. I think this element of acceptance or perhaps cynical surrender has made the work more contemporary.

Yes, now you have this studio right in the centre of London.

Yes, it's maybe why my work started to change, I wanted to incorporate that side of our world and not reject it. I was always quite ambivalent about it and now I am trying to accept as part of who I am and who we are going forward. That’s not to say I think the way individual and social life is advancing is entirely a good right now. I think embodied or communal experience is really important for humans. And yet my figures are very isolated and longing. It’s an expression of being between worlds and coming to terms with that.

Which almost makes them a warning?

Sort of, they’re definitely ambivalent. I feel more fulfilled when I am able to do things involving the body; it’s probably what engages me in painting itself. With the increased digitization and capitalization of life, it can be harder to find unmediated spaces. Capitalism
is very good at taking over anything and transforming it into a transaction or product. Like with advertising, it takes something originally genuine like a human emotion and transforms it and makes it transactional.

For me, I’ve always found it important to try and find ways to keep a part of myself outside of systematic existence, but capitalism’s expansionary nature sometimes makes it feel like the endpoint is that nothing will be outside of it. Escaping it in a city is especially hard, so I think in my work I want to investigate that engagement but perhaps ambivalence towards elements of the current societal direction.

FOR SALES ENQUIRIES please contact: 
​enquirIes@electrowerkz.co.uk