Will Teather

Personal Statement - August 2010

I am a figurative artist that mainly produces 2-dimensional objects such as paintings, drawings, photographs and prints. My aim is to create artworks that carry a narrative thread that frees the visual imagination from the restraints of reason. In the spirit of magical-realist fiction, the storytelling explores the indefinite space between reality and fiction, horror and humour, fantasy and fact. Vaudevillian characters inhabit a play without beginning or end, where carnival and folk traditions are pastiched together into simulacrum and spectacle. As with Angela Carter's novels, the carnivalesque elements of transgression and excess "allow illusion to work and the improbable to become possible."(Bowers, 2004)

The artworks employ a series of visual devices that invoke a sense of the Uncanny, creating a world where things are both familiar and alien. Equal importance is often spread across compositional elements, aimed at creating a subtly disorientating lack of central-focus. Many works exhibit what the theorist Maggie Anne Bowers would describe as a "static, tightly unified structure which often suggests a completely airless, glass-like space." This can be evinced in the graphic detail of the paintings, the use of photo-collage to create implausible depths of field and the formal arrangement to many of the compositions.

Jentsch's original example of the Uncanny is when one "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate." This may be seen in the doll-like crispness to the figures in the paintings and my adoption of Paula Rego's technique of using mannequins and masks to create characters that are then galvanised into life through paint. Reality is further transfigured in many works by the distortion of spacial relationships and a disregard for realistic perspective. In the spirit of Otto Dix's paintings, floors are upturned and shadows fall at unusual angles.

Many of the protagonists within the artworks are living performers, who have there own narratives that extend beyond the paintings into the realms of theatre and music. As the artworks develop I intend to create an archive of ephemera, collected from their activities both inside and outside of the artworks.