BA Degree Show June 2000
Landscape of the Horse and Horsescape of the Land
Artist's Statement
The work I have produced for the degree show is the culmination of a year of experimentation and processing through drawing, painting, photography and printmaking. At the beginning of the year I started looking at the history of the horse in art which led me to study the work of George Stubbs (1724 – 1806). I was looking for a way to successfully re-establish horse portraiture into a contemporary context through revisiting Stubbs, and my intention was to make an oil painting of a thoroughbred horse. I began the project by studying the book The Anatomy of the Horse by George Stubbs. On photocopying and enlarging the finely rendered etchings for closer inspection I was surprised to find that some areas of the flayed horse looked like typical 17th and 18th century landscape etchings. This led me to select and collage an anatomical landscape, and then as a reflection of this, landscape etchings from the 17th and 18th century into the shape of a horse. As a consequence of this amalgamation of landscape and horse I discovered the work of Giuseppe Archimboldo (1537 – 93). He made grotesque symbolic figures composed of fruits or animals, landscapes or implements. My work for the exhibition is meant to be read as a curiosity, a picture puzzle, to intrigue, beguile and amuse the viewer.
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