Ann-Marie James

My practice, which encompasses painting, drawing, sculptural intervention and photography, employs quotation to explore my relationship with both the specific source material that I appropriate, and the history of the discipline in which I am working. I am interested in taking something that already has an established cultural reading that I can wrestle with, adapt, exploit, examine and transform. Operating within the existing aesthetic of a pre-existing image or object, I aim to make something that is both in keeping with, and at odds with, the nature of its source.

Drawing upon cultural artifacts that, over time, have been widely considered to be revered, established, accomplished, poetic, beautiful or sublime, I seek to explore their transmutation to form new composites - a dry conceptual approach that is contrasted with a visceral aesthetic. Within my practice, aspects of purloined pictorial elements from art history are veiled, conjoined, contorted, revealed, emphasized, interpreted, translated, explored, repeated, omitted and manipulated, imbuing them with a new spirit to my own ends.

The hybrids that I have constructed have so far taken the form of small paintings on found book plates, pencil drawings, large scale pain...

2010-2012
Wimbledon College of Art
University of the Arts, London
MA Fine Art

2010
Chelsea College of Art and Design
University of the Arts, London
Postgraduate Diploma, Fine Art

2001 – 2004
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
University of the Arts, London
BA (Hons) Fine Art

2000 – 2001
Cambridge Regional College, Cambridge
BTEC Foundation Diploma in Art and Design