Elliot Coffin
Artist Statement
With collage as an operating system, my practice incorporates sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking. An intersectional approach dissects varying perspectives, with materials and processes each adopting loaded meaning - spray paint referencing graffiti.
Themes in my practice include: Ecology - using waste materials to examine societies relationship to nature; Interaction - breaking barriers in art engagement via tactile pieces in non-traditional ways; Impermanence - a shifting stock of materials arise in multiple works, challenging art prestige, alluding to objects temporal nature; Environment - visually influenced by urban textures, colours, and periphery community zones; and Symbolism - derived anywhere from religious art to technical illustration.
Objects can provide utility, which is informed by the resource of waste itself - an object that society has determined to be unuseful. Their vibrant materiality infuses an eco-political view to better understand our world and the lively powers of material formations and disintegrate their mechanistic perception. Relationships between commonplace modern era items and those from the natural world arise. This honest interpretation of our environment, with plastic, waste and natural materials co-existing is the perspective I hope to cement.
Abstract mark-making, colour, pattern, anatomical/mechanical illustration attempts to articulate an internal language. It is flexible in that it leans towards abstraction, but maintains some elements of realism, encouraging variable meanings of recognisable archetypal symbols. My creative approach is systematic but disruptive, with slippage between rules and expression in order to generate new routes to resolving an image. Conscious of stalling, there is value in punctuating processes with variable access points.