Natural Order

ARTWORKS

MOTIVATION

The body of work Natural Order was born out of an initial engagement with the study of holistic physics: chaos theory, thermodynamics, string theory and Mandelbrot’s study of fractal patterns. This felt like a natural continuation from my last exhibition ‘limp’ where I was observing a state of human inertia that lay paradoxically to a heightened sense of universal entropy. This state of momentary inertia seems to have waned into a more engaged human state within the crisis of our environment. This body of work poses questions about our current human reevaluation of self within the paradigm of nature.

The thread that has continuously run through my work is the observation of mankind’s unnatural relationship with the natural environment. I do this by setting up tension between natural and synthetic materials and form. In Natural Order, I work with layers of beeswax interspliced with shards of synthetic pigments or substances.

My paintings are worked thermically; constantly facing heat in order to find their form. Once the form has frozen in its place there remains something mystically active about the image, as though the figures could simply flow away. The entire plain can melt away if heated: an evocation of man’s fragility.

The mark-making evokes natural fractal patterns; these marks are unmeasured, instinctive, biomorphic and yet unquestionably human in their making. We have become so far removed from our animal state that the work we create is not considered to be part of the natural world. I chance to predict that in this time of ecological crisis we are beginning to understand our, human connection to the whole- we, as a species, are inseparable from our environment. We are an integral, albeit insignificant part of the greater whole. This body of work aims to reflect this shift of consciousness- the figures: weighted, waiting, disguised, consumed, pushing, contemplative and forlorn.