Studies for Baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit charcoal on canvas on canvas, 45x35cm, 2020
Studies for Baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit charcoal on canvas and oil on canvas, 45x35cm, 2019
In the painting The Baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit a number of creatures can be found inside Hazmat Suits they expanded from these studies.
I draw when I want to get to the underside of something, to excavate back in search of what I don’t yet know. I draw over and over because repetition allows the image to become porous and open to other influences. Sometimes repetitive studies become small works in themselves or a series. These baby Hazmats channel all kinds of references from the 16th century courtiers to chubby Beryl Cook figures, religious iconography and the history of western painting to early sci-fi serials and real threats of war.
Drawn directly on canvas the raw cotton canvas speaks of the advent of technology, inventions out of necessity to support life while the image fast forwards us to its destruction. Sometimes stretched and patched the canvases host tiny figures engulfed in protective suits designed to keep hazardous materials out, the babies float ungrounded, as if looking down on us, like the cherub whose distinctive gift is knowledge.
The baby Jesus is depicted with irreverent humour, the chubby baby peers out from a Hazmat Suit, with direct reference to the WWII gas masks that were designed and distributed by the UK government for babies under two years. The WWII Hazmat suits for babies are for me symbols of psychological barbarism - protections invented to appease man-made threats. For the child to survive air needs to be pumped manually into the suit, shifting responsibility from the state and instigators of war onto the mother whose strength was needed to operate the clunky mechanical device. The suite represents false promise and the illusion of care. It is an appeasement for the nation's worries over safety under siege, a fiction that offered little to no protection at all against real threat. The Hazmat suits are not a nostalgic or aesthetic choice but rather more to do with not forgetting. Not forgetting that those on whom we bestow authority will have no interest in our survival unless it is at the service of theirs.