Statement

I am more interested in what I don't know than in what I do and am particularly intrigued in the often transgressive overlap between various visual disciplines where demarcation and contention make new challenges. I work with everyday stuff, excavating ironic and formal relationships between the functions of objects, their histories and metaphoric shadows.

The use of "found" objects in making art pieces presupposes that they were "lost" in the first place. The idea of "recouping the outmoded" (Hal Foster "Compulsive Beauty") allows the object, with artistic intervention, to lose one identity and gain a number of others, creating layers of allegorical and symbolic meaning that reach for a fusion of creative coincidence.

Making additional interventions into recognisable objects creates new narratives, perspectives and startling re-readings of a paradoxical nature between the mundane and the art object and emphasises laterally hidden properties relating to interior forms and contradictory known functions.

The materials and processes I employ are not defined by convention or habit, nor by a hierarchy of form, but are dictated by the idea. I borrow from other skilled makers whose expertise I do not share but need.

I collide plastic, verbal and conceptual allusions, and develop situations where meaning and content slip and slide through the poetic, emotional and remembered spaces that we move through daily, often to unpredictable and humorous effect.

Pete Ellis