Explicit Content

Collage on wood panel
250mm x 250mm
2022
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Explicit Content is a riotous study of spectacle and seduction. The work stages a carnival of fetishised imagery and playful iconography, where the line between provocation and parody blurs. Desire here is never simple, it is packaged, exaggerated, and already mediated by the glossy surfaces of mass media. The figure at its centre becomes both subject and commodity, absorbed into a theatre of appetite where the erotic, the comic, and the absurd are tangled together.
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What emerges is less a portrait than a performance of culture itself, a witty reflection on how spectacle is consumed and reproduced. Explicit Content does not moralise so much as mirror back the ways in which visual culture markets temptation while claiming to regulate it. Glossy, bold and deliberately provocative, this one-off artwork delivers both bite and colour. It is a piece that starts conversations, a statement artwork that demands attention on any wall.
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This work was exhibited in CONTENT, a 2024 solo exhibition at Braemar Gallery in Springwood, New South Wales. Within the exhibition it resonated as a sharp reflection on appetite and performance, part of a broader exploration into the mechanics of 21st century media saturation.

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For the last 30 years I have been making physical, analogue, hand-cut collage art using only found materials.

That is an important distinction to make. When sourcing materials my work I do not use any form of reproduction, copying or digital manipulation in any way. All of the elements, all of the images that I use in my artworks, have been collected from the pages of magazines, books and comics, or from other printed materials like pamphlets, posters or flyers. A large part of the process of creating these pieces lies in the collection of the components. That is the thrill of the hunt; looking for the right pieces to fit together in order to create these compositions. Once found, the images are then hand cut from the page, most often with the use of scissors.

Once the materials have been collected and the collage has been constructed, my artwork then undergoes a process of varnishing, which not only give the collage a nice finish but also vastly improves the permanence of the item. All of the work that you see here has been treated with many layers of varnish and then buffed to a smooth finish. I often complete these artworks with a glossy top coat that gives each piece a shiny lustre that greatly enhances the vibrancy of the colours.

My studio is in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, on Dharug and Gundungurra country.