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Prints: Peter Hollinghurst: Artist Statement |
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Peter Hollinghurst is a local
artist living in West Sussex. Both a fine artist and an illustrator he
uses a computer to create most of his art these days and prints them
himself using an archival quality printer. Though his images often
look photographic he actually uses what are usually very small pieces
of photographs, often just samples of textures and colours, and
multiple variations are then overlaid and blended together through
subtle shifts in their opacity to form a new whole.
Art for me is an almost shamanistic
exploration of archetypal and interior spaces with the artist acting
as mediator in a dialogue between subject and viewer. Drawing on
Surrealist and Pre-Raphaelite influences I also integrate a love of
history, fantasy and the vast pile of imaginative fiction books I
devoured as soon as I could read. My fascination for the process of
entropy and decay in nature, the way things man-made or living are
absorbed by the land once neglected or transformed by light and shadow
is a perpetual source of inspiration for me. Dense urban landscapes,
wild woods and lonely deserted places form a subconscious background
to my imaginings. While the world of myth and dreams may feature
strongly in my work, I also find that contemporary ideas and events,
the stuff of my everyday experience or reading also plays a part in my
art. Deep down the occasional piece I create seems to have multiple
layers of meaning to it, from the bizarre or personal to the political
or mundane.’
The ‘Memory and Muchness’ series of
prints are based on the characters created for Alice’s adventures in
Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. The books
are timeless classics of literature, enchanting tales for children,
and mysteries for adults that are often re-imagined as cute and
frivolous stories and locked away in attic trunks of our recollections
and fond remembering's.
If we take them out and dust them down a little, and open our eyes to
them with all the knowledge we have accumulated over the yawning years
of mature disenchantment, we can discover the shards of tales we never
saw within these books when we were younger and the world seemed a
little brighter.
Echoes of myths of other lost girls in darker underworlds, ancient
Persephone's that call to their arms a multitude of innocents that
time has dragged (sometimes rather harshly) into newer times. Amidst
these shadowed mythologies are clustered haunting songs from our
dreams and nightmares, our phobias and insecurities. They shimmer and
twist reflected in the texts as if they were a looking glass in
themselves. And perhaps they are.
Prints of the series are available
as special edition archival giclee prints (signed on fine watercolour
paper, no more than 20 of each will be printed in either of the two
sizes available). UltraChrome K3 inks provide extremely high water,
gas and light resistance of over 75 years for these prints, meeting
museum quality archival standards.
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