STEVE CARRICK

Lives and works in Leeds, UK

Artist statement

I work across a number of different media utilising different material strategies and different languages. I have a background in Zoology and the work that I do always has some level of scientific intrigue at the heart of it. Science lays out particular ways of knowing the “natural world” and thus furnishes an imaginative point of departure for aesthetic production. The proposition in all of my recent work is to some degree the notion of the biological but not necessarily in any overt way. These are fictions, unreal manifestations that operate in multiple registers simultaneously, shifting from absurdity to melancholia, from apparent breakdown to potential regrowth. They mimic processes and anatomies, behaviours and camouflage like some tragic result garnered by humanity’s interference with ecology. My work invokes natural history displays altered by speculative fiction and post-human aesthetics, challenging traditional boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Recent installations: My recent large scale installations include an overwhelming amount of information in terms of materials, objects and images that operate together through projected animations to create a synthetic ecology not unlike a section of coral reef or a fragment of rainforest. Biology operates within systems that might seem chaotic and bewildering - the inside of a cell is a maelstrom of activity as shifts in concentrations of different molecules produce tangible outputs - it is not a system of...

Artwork