scenario(oct23) Print

James Vaulkhard holds a BA degree in History of Art from Leeds University, and has both trained and taught at Charles Cecil Studios and Studio Della Statua in Florence, Italy. Here, he gained a formidable reputation for his ability to embrace and manifest traditional techniques in both portraiture and sculpture. Notably, upon his graduation in 2013, Vaulkhard was commissioned to participate in a bridge project between Italy and Kenya, developing the preliminary studies for The Sacred Heart Cathedral Kericho in collaboration with local Kenyan sculptors. In 2014, Vaulkhard relocated to London and continued to develop an artistic style that reframed his classical training and moved towards a more experimental category of visual expression. His first work to be exhibited in London was a series of collage works featuring seven representations of the fictional hero James Bond comprised of found erotic and pornographic imagery. In the wake of the success of that series he created a series entitled Icon that employed the same techniques. This included his acclaimed unauthorized 2017 portrait of then-President of The United States Donald Trump, created from cuttings of historical dictators and political tyrants. In 2019, Vaulkhard returned to his roots in oil painting, creating a large-scale series of dystopian landscape paintings entitled Echo Chambers–a collection of algorithm-inspired 'cave-paintings' that posed questions about human identity in an era that the artist suggests may prove to be the dawn of guided evolution. These abstract forms blended a primordial past and potential future, depicting fingerprints and crude depictions of beasts veined in algorithmic code. In his most recent work, Vaulkhard has combined techniques developed in both these series of works and married them to the aesthetic arena of Japanese art, specifically addressing the mysterious concept of Ma or negative space. The result is a series of abstract landscapes intended to draw the viewer deeper into nature via an overwhelming visual cacophony that seeks to communicate the vast potentialities that exist between the elements.