Colm Lawton
My work is concerned with the human perspective on the natural world. I adorn that gaze with a kitsch sentimentality which depicts for me the futility of the enterprise of comprehension. I like how this apparently unbridgeable gap is conveyed to me by the ephemera in the Natural History Museum gift shop: how the smell of preservative and varnish in the air serve to punctuate the artificiality of the institution's enterprise of translating the world at large into culture. There is a discontinuity forced upon the spectrum of the world in the museum, but this partitioning is necessary for us to describe the world and to share the experience of it.
It is a kind of magic to me that we cannot see the world without naming it. I think that there is a loss occurring when we remove something from its place and into our articulable experience. This strange problem is the thread common to the subject of my painted work because, to me, it is a model for that important problem shared by the maker who must position themselves within the field of culture in order to help describe it