You Look Good by Gareth Brighton

My work is based around implied narrative, aiming to engage viewers as the author of their own narrative sparked by the scenes I have produced. My subject matter concerns perceivable middle points such as a moment or transition.

I source all my imagery from film. The films and TV shows I appropriate from range in form, genre and time so in this way my work isn’t about a story as much as it is about storytelling. These images are then touched up on the computer before I turn them into a simple stylized line drawing. I work on many images at once doing one quick layer on each at a time before moving on. Pencil, then loose expressive brush marks before working in with large printed blocks of color. Each step in my process further removes the image from its original source until the pictorial space becomes a general psychological mise-en-scene.

My works are depicted onto salvaged plywood and textiles. It is the gesture of equally appropriating from both our image and material reality that grounds my work and makes for a more reconciled image object. Depicting an image on to an obviously solid material has the effect of subverting the illusion of space which is implied within my images construction and flattening the image out. This allows the image to be assessed in terms of narrative as well as formal pictorial language.

In 2012 I left Canterbury University (Christchurch, New Zealand) after completing a degree in Fine Arts in the printmaking department and returned to study half a year of art history in 2013. In 2014 I completed my Honors degree with supervision from Simon Ogden in printmaking and Robin Neate in painting. Starting in 2015 and graduating in 2016 I completed my Masters degree. The same year I published my artist book Temporal which was designed by Gemma Banks and included writing by Keir Leslie and Warren Feeney.

I came to Ironbridge after traveling through Europe and the UK on a travel scholarship from The University of Canterbury with my partner, who grew up in Coalbrookdale. Out of all the places I visited in the UK, Ironbridge, with its looming power station and industrial history, was the one I felt an affiliation with. Seeing as the gorge gave me my partner (not to mention the slightly eccentric peacock fountain in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens) I felt it important to show some of my hometown by way of my work.