THE

INDEPENDENT ART SCHOOL

MICHAEL BRANTHWAITE

Personal profile:

Kinetic installation and sculpture informs Michael Branthwaite's theoretical research into the 'genuine' experience of art. Braithwaite's interest is focused on the subliminal ability of art to uncover new social and political positions and view points. Without aiming to produce a finite object Braithwaite's work explores play and aesthetic balance to search for a visual equivalent of a mental process, his work is often a 'carcass' of the creative process involved in the production of incidents and objects. Currently he is working on a plan for an 'IAS' creative workshop focusing on using a visual/verbal dialogue to investigate the process of transforming ideas into context/reality.

Artists Statement:

I am obsessed with the domestic, I aim, through my work to investigate this obsession and discover new departures through which I can investigate and discover new concepts and ideas. My interests are mainly about or in the vicinity of commoditisation and consumption, for instance I am particularly interested in the relationship industry has in comparison to the domestic, focusing on how a domestic product is developed and produced on an industrial scale and then absorbed in to the everyday fabric of life as an individual icon.

My practice focuses on notions of play, relying on instinctive and inventive use of materials, using objects taken from my vernacular environment, as well as constructed elements. In the past my practice has focused on kinetics and time based events. I enjoy playing on the notion of desire that Lacan highlights in his texts by juxtaposing the consummate with the uncanny, my aim being to absorb the viewer in a revaluation of there personal possession's by way of re-inventing domestic and consumer objects with in a Fine Art context.

I feel that my work tests and investigates the similarities between, commodity fetishism, culture, nature and belief. At its base is the realisation that what objects mean is shifting, and liable to mutate. This mutation can have a hopeful aspect that I aim to demonstrate through my choice of aesthetic process's and decision making, engaged with a thread that runs through Modernism - between the aesthetics of form and an engagement with lived experience. I feel my job is to test reality, with out an obtrusive show of technique, aiming to investigate the functioning and transformation of objects.

As part of my methodology, I make reference to art history and modernism this can be coded or explicit. I want to move away from what I perceive as fantasies of a false utopian reality; what I invent is extrapolated from what exists using modification and rearrangement of object/relations and dispersing with conscious metaphor or narratives.

My work is developed as much from time spent in shopping centres and flicking through junk mail, questioning the objects for sale and developing works which can be best described as an alternative that runs along side the condition of 20th century life in an urban environment.

Previous activity for the Independent Art School:

SEMINAR - 'Art and Artifice'

took place on Wednesday 28th May 2003

Held in the Canteen ashburne house, Sunderland University.

Chaired and Organised by Michael Branthwaite