Tom Bull

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

I make sculptures, videos and instillations in an absurd attempt to capture the lived experience within these dark, strange and untrustworthy times. Through a landscape of folklore, rurality, modernity and ritualism, I investigate the tension and slippage between fiction and representation, violence and sensitivity, truth and mythology. With a wide range of tools and materials borrowed from architecture, model making, craft, aspirational design, preservation, farming and forestry, I employ a practice that confronts and manipulates traditions, time periods, location, lore and genre. My most recent works interrogate “country life” by challenging issues around land, loss, community, nostalgia, access, labour and violence. These works are nuanced and complex, not just imitating life but working within it, for they do not seek answers to life’s ambiguities instead they highlight them as well as their resultant anxieties, playing with them as a visual medium, giving them form and presence. I grew up in rural Northamptonshire and my relationship to rurality is at the heart of my work. This engagement is complex: a combination of lived experience of nineteen years in the countryside and the distance with living and studying in London for many years has given me. My works emerge from this encounter between the personal and the critical. Wary of the dangers of glorifying rural life, which can produce a romanticised version of conservatism. Consequently, my engagement with folk...

Artwork