ARTIST STATEMENT
SAM TALBOT-KELLY
I was born in Leamington, England in 1969, grew up in Toronto, pursued undergraduate visual art studies in Montreal and later earned my Masters in FINE ART in San Antonio, Texas. I have been exhibiting my work as an emerging artist in alternative spaces and galleries in the US and Canada for ten years.
My artistic practice revolves around the creation of conceptual apparel and mixed-media painting/design.
Materials inform my ideas and process into the construction of clothing design. These designs showcase ‘identity’ as by-products of cultural debris, as leftovers of mass-consumption and systems of language in our popular culture. I take discarded books of all categories, old music sheets, playing cards, the throw away of cleaning products, cereal boxes, magazines, newspapers, rejected clothes and unwanted fabrics and transform them into CHARACTERS for musing. The site for these works is the ‘BODY’ yet my designs can be transferred to a number of contexts. They are used in performance, laid bare on vintage and contemporary mannequins, installed in window displays, galleries, or worn in fashion shows. As constructions their ‘material’ entertains the notion of a ‘social fabric’ in order to express our humanity through acts of play, poetry and of establishing a sense of belonging. Dressing styles can communicate codes but mine are invented narratives of art on the body. I pay attention to ‘texts’, to the graphic patterns of language, music, the falling lines of drapery, to art history and the colors of our human spirit.
In painting I use oils on linen, birch panel or on leather. My drawings vary from colored pencils, collage, inks to markers. This 2-D work tends to side with the surreal and the poetic. The relationship between the way I represent imagery and the work’s content comes from making associations with non-art experiences, popular culture and a free tie with our cultural past. This practice allows me to express ‘dress’ as a fusion of my imagination and my cultural context, of the playful with the serious, and of seeing dress as an engagement between form and the formless.