Being Human
My response to being human began after finding a body of film created in Scotland depicting boys in summer. I found these stills in the National Library of Scotland’s moving image Archive website. During my exploration of this archive I was reading the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work and contemplating her thoughts and relating them to my own. Throughout this project I have also been researching artists who either tackle the same subject matter or who paint and create work with the same morbid atmosphere, artists such as Ken Currie, Phil Hale and Michael Landy. I was drawn to these figures and portrayed them the way I have because I was thinking about how painting people naked or partially clothed with no modern day objects around them to create context, created a primitive essence and detached them from the modern human today. Making us consider what it means to be human? What differs us from animals? How important are inanimate objects to us today? Do they bring us together or help us identify with each other? These were some of the questions that were provoked by my research and the creation of my work.