'Pop culture is what binds us together,' writes critic Stephen Holden.
I am obsessed with pop culture, and as an artist, I make work that reflects that obsession and the various cultures and
subcultures surrounding it. Focusing on the rock world, I investigate the image culture and compulsive collecting that
are central to my own life.
In 2000, I invented a rock star alter-ego, Marisa Starwell, and created an assortment of material related to her -
everything but the music. I began with 'faked' album covers, magazine covers, etc. then moved on to search for sightings of
Starwell in mediated culture, no longer using images of myself. I assembled scrapbooks of these obsessively collected
sightings that include images spanning several decades, and I made badges featuring both these images and hand-drawn
Starwell logos. We all want to be rock stars (or film stars or sport stars), and that fantasy is the product of living in a mass
mediated society steeped in celebrity worship.
Since returning to London in late 2002, my work has continued to focus on rock culture and fandom and all of the
related ephemera, though I have moved beyond Marisa Starwell to look at the details surrounding other existing
rocknroll imagery. An essential component of the Starwell work was the nostalgia for pop eras gone by (including
1960s rock and soul and 1970s punk), and it is this theme which has become the focus of my recent work.
It is a fixation on key moments in pop history - moments that I regret being born too late to live in -
and thus nostalgia for an age I never experienced.
Intertwined with a worship of all things retro is a preoccupation with being cool. In both the rock and art worlds, there is
a bizarre combination of hipness and self-consciousness ('geek chic'), and it is this particular area that I am most fascinated by.
My drawings are of my pop heroes, but these are men who are anything but heartthrobs - for the most part, they are not the leaders of the band; they are the ugly drummers, the uncool sidekicks. They are not supposed to be anyone's favourites, and thus can be seen as
almost anti-heroic figures. I use pencil to finely render the small drawings, referencing teen fan culture, and my
fascination with the trainspotting culture of record collectors dictates my use of emphemeral text in many of the drawings.
More recently, these portraits have led to a related, concurrent series of object-based drawings, some of which examine the aesthetics of femininity in 1960s mass media and pop culture.
My use of polaroid photography makes direct reference to my love for retro, and I have been working on an ongoing
collection of polaroids of gig culture and ephemera, focusing on the coolness bestowed upon otherwise-mundane
electronic musical equipment. Other series include polaroids of 'collections'; inkjet prints of combined found text from 'cool' sources;
as well as a collection of black-and-white inkjet prints of altered stills from obscure 1950s and1960s films and filmmaking books.
Transforming the pictures into pseudo-black-and-white television screen images, they become super retro cool, looking even more like images/objects from the past.
As both an artist and a pop fan, I look for connections between the two worlds, finding points of
intersection and overlap. Rock appeals to a mass audience while most art only reaches a select few.
In making work that is so heavily influenced by mediated images, I aim to make work that easily lends itself to
mass reproduction, thus reaching a wider audience.