Jeremy Morgan Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
In my painting I aim to walk a precarious but playful path along boundaries: between object and product, digital and analogue, flat and physical, design and art, work and play. I’m aiming to find a response as a painter working in a digital age – a response which I accept will flex and stretch to accommodate contradictions and deviations as my practice, and the world which inspires it, evolve.
I'm interested in how abstract forms can act as stand-ins for actual beings and objects - stripping the sentimentality away from more representational approaches, to hopefully synthesize and focus on a narrative (albeit a narrative which is abstract and open to interpretation). However, simultaneously to my abstract practice, I am working on a series of representational landscape paintings and I enjoy the frictions and possibilities thrown up through embracing both abstract and representational elements – I hope I arrive at a more meaningful conclusion through this inclusive strategy.
I often use mundane materials in the construction of my pieces – such as carpentry off-cuts. The arbitrary depths of these materials sets up a ‘compositional problem’ for me to ‘solve’ through surface intervention – the colour and form which I use to both balance and topple the composition.
I often employ a stripped-down visual language within the abstract works: dots might act as surrogate human or robotic beings either at play – slipping and sliding within an obscure digital game – or at work, within unstable, dynamic environments suggesting construction or factory production. Within them there is space to ask questions on the conflicted relationship between online leisure (gaming and social media) and the use of the resulting personal data gathered, in addition to the aesthetics of composition and colour which equally interest me.
