02Artistic Position

James Jean

Those red works are something else. The colour alone, that burning flesh-warm red, and the way the line holds both precision and life. But it's more than the surface. He pulls creatures and natural forms into something mythological, which is what I want my subjects to do too. A tree shouldn't just be a tree. His density makes the surface feel alive and a little overwhelming, and I want that same pressure in my work, that feeling that there's too much at stake to look away.

“the best paintings... are born from the deepest recesses of the mind, from dark and surprising places”

Walton Ford

Walton Ford might be the closest thing to a direct ancestor for what I'm doing. Extinction, species loss, the violence that sits underneath beauty and civilisation - it's all there. He works in this incredibly seductive naturalist style, like Audubon, and then the subject matter pulls the rug completely. That's the exact mechanism I want in my own work. You're drawn in by the rendering and then you realise what you're actually looking at. The subject is always a kind of farewell.

Lee Gihun

What strikes me about Gihun is how he uses these small, almost cute animal protagonists to carry enormous environmental dread. The scale of the catastrophe around them makes them look impossibly vulnerable, and that contrast is doing all the work. I'm interested in that same relationship between the intimate and the vast. My subjects are also stand-ins, witnesses to something much larger than themselves. And that quote says everything about his intent: the animal is not a symbol, it's a person.

“Listen carefully. I'm not a horse. I'm a person. … That's why... I can't forgive you for everything you're doing.”

Vivan Sundaram

The engine oil and charcoal works are the connection for me. He's using the actual substance of ecological destruction as his medium, which makes the material itself an argument. I'm not quite doing that but would like to do more of it.

Mazatl

That red is an immediate connection — urgent, warm, the colour of living things under threat, which is exactly what sanguine carries for me too. But it's the themes that really land. He treats animals as sacred and sovereign, not as symbols of something else. And working at street scale, taking it out of the gallery entirely - that ambition is something I think about a lot. I want to make work that big. His sketchbooks are also something else - that's where you see the thinking, and he takes them to a level that makes them complete works in their own right.

Aida Makoto

From a distance it reads as landscape, almost serene. Get close and it's made entirely of discarded bodies. That shift is exactly what I was working with in the bison piece. You see mass, weight, a kind of monument, and then you start to read what that mass is actually made of. The horror is in the resolution. I want my work to do that too, to let you settle into something beautiful before it tells you what you're actually looking at.

“Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things”

Cai Guo-Qiang

The gunpowder drawings are one connection, that idea of using destruction to make something and the mark being violent and beautiful at the same time. But it's also the animals. That tiger pinned with arrows is not a symbol, it's a body. There's real grief in it. He treats animal subjects with a weight and dignity that I want in my own work, and the fact that he wraps it all in spectacle and beauty makes it hit harder, not softer. I'm not trying to resolve anything with the protest series. I'm trying to make the conflict impossible to look away from.

“The role of art in society is not to resolve conflicts; rather, it is to express these conflicts and antagonisms.”

Anselm Kiefer

A forest as cathedral, as a place between heaven and earth. That's exactly the register I want my work to operate in, where a tree is never just a tree but something with the weight of the sacred behind it. His landscapes carry collective trauma in the earth itself, in the actual materials, the ash and rust and straw. The palette too, those deep ochres and scorched grounds are very close to where I'm working in sanguine.

“I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral... it is a place between heaven and earth”

Fuyuko Matsui

What she does with tradition is remarkable. The Nihonga technique, that exquisite, painstaking detail, carries centuries of weight and then she turns it toward something deeply unsettling. The tenderness in the rendering makes the horror worse, not better. That dead fawn is rendered with such care and precision that you can't look away, which is exactly the problem she wants you to have. That tension between beauty and what the beauty is actually depicting is the core of what I'm trying to do too. The more seductive the surface, the harder the subject lands.

Josh Keyes

The subject matter is almost identical to what I'm doing, displaced wildlife, ecological collapse, animals navigating a world that has been broken around them. But what really gets me is the skill. That hyper-realism is doing serious work. The more precisely rendered the animal, the more unbearable its situation becomes. He doesn't editorialise, he just shows you the thing with total clarity and lets that be enough. That's a lesson I take seriously. The craft is the argument.

H.R. Giger

It's the drawings that stop me, that hyper-detailed monochrome work where organic forms are locked into mechanical systems. Bodies and machines indistinguishable from each other, nature consumed by and fused with the industrial. That's a metaphor that runs right through my practice. There's also something in the sheer density of mark-making, the commitment to rendering every surface, that I find genuinely instructive.

Otobong Nkanga

What really resonates is how she thinks about ecology as relationality, the idea that everything is connected and that those connections carry memory and history. A forest isn't just a forest, it's a network of relationships that we are in the process of destroying, and she makes that feel urgent without ever being didactic about it.

Sam Wolfe Connelly

The Conté connection is direct, but what I am coming back to is how unashamedly illustrative his work is. It tells a story, it has characters, it has atmosphere, and none of that makes it less serious as art. I have an illustrative instinct too and I don't always give myself permission to follow it. He makes me think I should. The image can carry a narrative and still be doing something that matters.

Banksy

There's something in how direct he is, no ambiguity about what he's saying or whose side he's on. My work is more oblique than that, but the activist intent is the same. And the innocence set against violence thing, that tender image carrying something brutal, that's a mechanism I understand completely.

Bob and Roberta Smith

The word protest is right there in my series title and his practice is built entirely on that word as both form and function. What I find interesting is how he uses humour and joy to carry something genuinely urgent, the belief that art is a democratic right, not a luxury. My approach is more oblique, I use beauty and seduction where he uses bold text and colour, but the intent underneath is the same. I'm also genuinely drawn to the energy of text in work and I want to find a way to bring it into my own practice. I haven't landed on how yet, but he makes me want to keep trying.

Mark Bradford

His work is about what gets erased and what survives, about power leaving its mark on a place and on a people. My subject matter is different but the underlying question is the same. What do we lose when systems of power go unchallenged, and what does that loss look like when you try to make it visible? History as accumulation, as something that sediments into the ground itself, that framing runs directly through my practice. Just with trees instead of neighbourhoods.

Nicolas Party

He's taken a medium that gets condescended to and made it undeniable. That gives me real confidence working in sanguine Conté, it sits in similar territory. And the scale is something I genuinely aspire to. Pastel at that size stops being delicate and becomes something else entirely, something you can't dismiss. The surface looks seductive, almost gentle, but something is off. The beauty is a trap. That's exactly the tension I'm after.