My work is multi-faceted. I make images through the integration of text, photography, painting/printing, drawing, using the computer, projections – anything which serves to communicate ideas.
As a painter my practice may appear at first glance to engage the ancient technologies of mark making and colour deployment. However, my work represents a unique fusion of old and new technologies – one that adapts and adopts new technology to inform the age-old process of applying media to a surface; I make use of redundant communication technologies and languages, employing visual and other media – digital images, photogcopying, scanning and collage to realise images. The image is retrieved and reused, separated from its original context and meaning and combined with adapting/using contemporary technology as a layer or screen, annotated with my own hand.
This process or language that harnesses technologies, does not preclude the finished work necessitating the input of the human hand in order to complete it, to give meaning to this.
The process I use is equivalent to a ‘Remix’ – of technology and image. Images go through a process using digital printmaking, collage, layering and painting/markmaking.
The outcome of this process, using new and old technologies, can still be painterly – the artist’s role as pioneer magpie demands this. Art movements throughout history have returned to materials and their application (technology), often dictated through the necessity – ‘arte povera’, skip hopping or the increasing use of freeware for instance.
Jules A. Sykes