John Stark
Artist’s Statement:
My practice attempts to trace how myths and legends have been used to make sense of the world and understand human nature through metaphysical investigation. It is a ceremonial exploration of the hermetic labyrinth where the dead stuff of paint becomes charged, like hosts such as bread and wine becoming sacred through ritual blessing or blood becoming paint on sacrificial totems. I see my practice as a ‘call to the wild’ and an attempt to return to a perennial wisdom of imaginative insight that potentially restores us to our own true selves.
The paintings themselves are reflections of a doomed world and metaphors for a ‘utopia’ that religion and politics have continually promised us and failed to deliver. They are time, labour and matter transformed into artistic value and optimistic transformations of the medium of paint, through an act of alchemy, which potentially deconstructs our notions of perception and conditioning.
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