John Robinson

Lives and works in Worcester, UK

Artist statement

My paintings begin as performances in which I try to become someone or something else. I construct masks, costumes and props from reproductions of paintings, religious images, cosmological diagrams, domestic objects and cheap jewellery. I wear them, photograph the attempt, then rebuild the encounter in oil. I grew up Christadelphian in Worcester. I left the faith but not the need for belief. These images come with instructions about beauty, holiness, desire, or how the world should be ordered. I test those instructions by putting my body inside them. My queerness taught me to recognise myself obliquely in images with no place prepared for me. I have worn Hobbema’s painting The Avenue at Middelharnis as a face and cut eyeholes into a diagram of the universe. In A Real Girl I put my eyes, nose, mouth and hand onto a woman taken from Benny Hill. I wanted her and wanted to be her at once. I did not know where one want ended and the other began. I never disappear completely into the disguise. My eyes remain my eyes. Cardboard buckles and cheap jewellery stays cheap. I want that failure. It can be comic, painful or ecstatic. Oil slows the failed transformation down. In painting I can stay with the instant when a mask reveals rather than conceals, and belief survives not as doctrine but as the hope that an image might still change me.

Artwork