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Alison Shanks Artists Statement
My sculptures are primarily made with Porcelain and are mainly Janus heads which have an ancient, God like, larger than life quality.
The Porcelain is silkscreen printed with fragmented and distorted images taken from mass media.
I first became interested in the pixelation of the image through the work of Sigma Polkel. I began to lose the faces into QR Codes and later Bar-codes. In later works I then smothered them with a disease of pixels.
My work progressed into the facial images becoming cut, stretched and manipulated into a collage; the photographic facial image being made to seem slightly lost in screen transmission, interference lines and white noise. I began to imbed Binary code into the works and also I-clouds.
We as humanity are currently living in a world that is multi-directional, out of balance. We are destroying ourselves and our planet for individual profit. We are manipulated and divided by mass media to hate other people's views and cultures. We are surveyed and monitored. Facial Recognition Technology, Social Media, so called Artificial Intelligence with its biased algorithms are in constant use.
There is a loss of self: we are confused, disoriented, invaded and out of balance. Are we becoming 'dehumanised'?
There are various underlying themes in my work showing how we are controlled and manipulated by an over-saturation of mass media, technology, social media, fake news, surveillance, religion and consumerism in all forms.