Degree Show 2010,Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design,

Dundee

‘We lack resistance. We lack creation’- Gilles Deleuze  

Conceptually, my work deals with the idea of political resistance: that through an engagement between artist and audience, through the display or making public of an art work, an engagement may happen which invites the viewer to begin a critical process, that art may become the ‘site’ of an event for the subject.[1] This ‘event’ allows the viewer to look at the world in new and previously unimagined ways. In short, art can challenge us to re-think our relationship with the world; to challenge the viewer into to re-imagining that which is presented as something that should be taken for granted. Art can bring us to resist accepting the ways things are as an inevitable reality; all things made by men can be modified, changed or radically altered. Resistance in art gives us the offer to begin engaging, questioning and -most importantly- thinking critically again.

It is on this criteria of engagement that I may investigate the idea of how art may become a ‘site of resistance’: through art we may invent, experiment with and develop new ways to protest and resist against normative thinking prevalent and pervasive in all aspects of a society subsumed under capitalism.

Prior to my degree show, for months I collected fast food packaging, banking application forms and their promotional material. These nave been resisted by being pulped; being remade into books or large blank sheets of paper. It is an act of resistance through re-appropriation.

I did to their credit card application forms what they did to the economy: pulped it. The result – the literal blank paper- is the blank slate we should take the present to be as our ideological ‘status quo’ has failed and it should allow us as citizens to begin thinking of a different reality

[1] The idea of an ‘Event’ relates to a rupture in the subject’s reality and allows for a re-evaluation of truth. The term is referent of Alain Badiou and his book ‘Being and Event’ which takes around 1000 pages to explore what is, in effect, a very simple concept!