John Hancock BA Studio Practice Research

(1/11/22) On the 1st of November after having painted one of my wooden boards with pink and red enamel paint, I was trying to place the next piece of the puzzle.  This came in the form of some dried liquid latex and sofa cushion filling.  When I got into the studio on this day (1/11/22) I was feeling a mental block. I had felt this somewhat during my commute on the train, but had merely dismissed it as tiredness and told myself that once I woke up a bit I would be fine. Surely enough the mental block persisted and I found myself hunched over in a chair, looking at the paintings I had started (at least I had started), feeling the nausea of existential dread soak through me (melodrama implied).  I do usually expect this mental block during the start of a new project. Especially in the early stages where the paintings have so much possibility it is difficult to tell what way they will go. Never the less I decided to take myself for a walk, in an attempt to clear my mind of t...

Sometimes inspiration strikes in the most unexpected ways. I had been thinking of and seeking new directions to take a new piece of work in.  Something that builds on the back of the work I have been creating in recent years with liquid latex, texturising pastes, oil paints and them all being set fire to.  These past works have mostly been off whites, blacks, greys and varying shades of beige of liquid latex. And although I enjoy the boldness of the subtlety of the off whites and alive and crawling latex colours and textures, I had been looking to progress these textures into a new space.  While searching Instagram I stumbled upon a post from a page called Unifiedgoods that had made a 25th birthday T-Shirt for the Harmony Korine film Gummo. (Post Pictured Below). The image on the T-Shirt immediately caught my eye because of the grimey and wonderful colours and imagery that adorn the shirt. Naturally, after seeing this image I went in search of other similarly coloured sti...