Joss Nelson

My current practice seeks to engage with the relationship between beauty and violence; that violence can often be disguised within exquisite natural beauty. Involving a process that consults the historical narrative of power, my work attempts to visualise the use of violence as tool for power. Researching the various global histories of art, I am interested in the figurative aspects of landscape and its close association with people - more specifically the effect of the human figure on the landscape, both as a compositional aspect and as a manner of understanding the consequences of human acquisitiveness.
Working primarily in painting and drawing, I have been researching the extent of the human obsession with materiality and materialism; that art has become victim to the materialistic and insatiable appetite of the consumer in a new way. I believe it is important to be aware that art has become another yet another consumer commodity. It is not made to be experienced; it is made to be owned. Goaded by conglomerates in the fashion and art worlds, we must carve out the relevance of this enquiry within the art of our shared contemporary context of increased globalisation and disparity.
My work attempts to incorporate the themes of reuse, capitalism and nature, and my recent oil paintings on cardboard attempt to take a discarded material and offer it a new life, elevating its position as a material and media for painting on. I think it is also important to find a subject matter in one’s surroundings, and I have been observing the dialogue between the natural environment and human-made, artificial environment. Returning back to working with canvas more recently, I believe that the artist is part of the whole process of making the work, building the stretcher and preparing the surface yourself. This way we might counter the effects of hyper-digitalisation, to which the art world is only increasingly exposed.