IAN WIECZOREK - Visual Artist

Intervention/Reinvention

<<Back to Earlier Work

Meat Series

Land Series 1

Land Series 2

Boxmeat

"This work originated in a process that began with the making of a number of painted studies of sides of beef hanging up in a butcher's cold store. The results of this action yielded some interesting possibilities: while attemping to be quite dispassionate in the treatment of the subject matter, purely in terms of colour and formal organisation, the emotive associations with meat remained.
To further explore this phenomenon, the original studies were re-rendered in such a way that the visual cues would suggest a different subject entirely: the familiar genre of landscape, something that finds particular resonance in the visual art of the West of Ireland. So, portions of butchered meat have been transformed into notional landscapes using styles typically associated with landscape painting, while maintaining the original palette and basic formal structure (albeit realigned into a horizontal geography more traditionally associated with landscape).
The results are notional landscapes that border on the familiar, yet their connection with their original subject - particularly with reference to the original colour palette - evokes a sense of otherness that subverts initial expectations. Through the synthesis of context and essence, this visual reinvention creates an ambiguity that invites a process of ongoing re-evaluation for the viewer."

- Ian Wieczorek
(extract from exhibition literature, 2006)