Iain Hales MRSS

The use of colour is central to my practice, for some time I have been working with the conceit – “what would a painting made by a sculptor look like?” I’m interested in ‘collapsing’ the space between painting and sculpture, exploring the slippage between ‘object’ and ‘image’.

I am fascinated by material and texture; particularly interested in the way our perception of colour is changed by the texture of material, or by juxtaposing those colours and materials.

Collage or layering is an important mode for me. Typically working in unfixed compositions of discrete studio-made components – I am interested in the allusion to temporality this makes – I appropriate art-historical/cultural archetypes, and take the ‘mute’ forms of modernism, ‘packing’ them full of significance. The works coalesce around these things, by semiotic, sometimes clanging, associations of colours, materials and textures; through the grouping of specific forms; and by making nods to different reference points, both pop cultural and art historical.