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Primitives and outsiders.....
Iain Bank's Wasp
factory really encapsulates, for me, the beauty and discomfort
of a private obsessive world. It is the secret and the miniscule.
Gaston Bachelard describes a 'narrow gate' that leads us to an
entire other world. "An aesthetic of hidden things.."
It is not only the hidden world
but also the Surrealist-DaDa tradition of combining seemingly
disparate objects and the beauty of a contained display of strange
objects that appeals to me.
Somewhere inbetween the raw substance
of HC Westermann, the instinctive touch of Bill Traylor and the
elegant poetry off Joseph Cornell, is a language of putting things
together. Creating a narrative not only with the images but also
the material.
My art is influenced by what
is loosely described as Outsider art. The definitions of this splintered field have come
to include folk art, naive art as well as schizophrenic
art, and visionary self taught art. For purists though
the term 'Outsider' should refer to the real marginal,
maverick, untainted or eccentric artist, as such this art
really is a product of a personal , and sometimes a delicately
private and painful world.
The Surrealists and Da-Daists
set the modernist agenda for cultural appropriation, now
mainstream curators include folk art or self taught artists
such as Cheri Bamba and Howard Finster in exhibitions and the
definition has become blurred. The market for 'Raw'
art is growing, as testified by the large art fairs devoted
to the field, as seen in Raw Vision.
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