The White Knight is Talking Backwards

The White Knight is Talking Backwards triptych is suffused with sci-fi and dystopian imagery, surreal fairytale references, histories of war and the creaturely other. The canvases are populated by maternal figures, nurses, and carers tending to the sick. The Bombardier reads a story while the bones of atomic veterans glow in the dark. In my work, masks, headgear, helmets and goggles feature as bodily augmentations while composite creatures relieve the humans of duty. 

In his essay Creaturely Cobra (2012), Hal Foster asserts that the creaturely makes its appearance in times of crisis. From the therianthropes, (beings that combine human and non-human features) etched into stone by our ancient ancestors to the creatures found in Cobra paintings, from the moment we claimed our humanity by externalising thought into pictures to the existential crisis brought about by the barbarism of WWII, Foster suggests that it is not a matter of where or how but of when such creatures appear and that such a time might also be now.

The hybrid creatures and masked or augmented humans that appear in my work are a response to crisis both personal and political. In the 21st century the imaginary might be the best, the only, way of dealing with the existential threats we face in a post-truth climate of ulterior facts, (mis)information and histories being re-written. Painting for me is a slow resistance to information overload, a haptic intervention against the stream of images invading consciousness and a strategy to expose the shrapnel embedded in us by digital media. Painting is a process of excavating the network of past experiences and present conditions beyond layers of disconnection to find what cannot be taken away because it was not yet known, something ambiguous and less moving in time. My images play with the resemblance of things in order to leave an open narratives that are porous and contingent, darkly humorous and scripted with political intent. 

Consisting of three distinct panels brought together to form a cinematic whole moving in sequence from left to right in a horizontal time frame.

The White Knight is Talking Backwards: Triptych [450x200cm] charcoal, spray paint and oil on canvas, 2019

1. The Baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit 

2. The Bombardier is Telling a Story

3. One Pill Makes You larger and One Pill Makes You Small and the Ones that Mother Gives You Don’t Do Anything at Al