Stephen Marshall

“the dead sea the cool mist hikers getting hit by lightning”

My practice is concerned with the difficulties and relationships of authenticity and identity. My work includes video and writing, whilst being primarily orientated around painting and the concepts of 'the painter'. I am interested in the intertextual relationships between the historical weight and act of painting together with meta-histories and physical action, co existing and inhabiting a space.

Welsh histories are explored within dispersed scenarios and a disjointed nonlinear narrative. Figures struggle with the witnessing, understanding and reinterpreting of gestures and experience. The false but familiar substitute landscapes create a gestalt of personal paradise and understanding; the creation of an autobiographical, fictional theatre of context or roman a clef.

Aesthetically I am concerned with failure, night time colours and inviting chance. I am excited by non-painting and a recyclable disposability. Time is spent with points of emptiness, large black fields and plays on obvious metaphorical motifs, with echoes of good and bad painting cooperating towards some sort of balance.

I have exhibited worldwide and my work is featured in national collections...

Edinburgh College of Art
MFA Contemporary Art Practice