Ben S Wade

After drawing for five years I stopped all artwork for around two years after a breakdown. I have recently started drawing again around a year ago, working back into older works to reclaim and refine my technique and process yet again, while also creating new artworks. Setting myself the goal and task to teach myself how to draw again by experimenting in a range of mediums and approaches. 

 

My current work is concerned with how the contemporary media uses a set of shifting and established signs, symbols, stereotypes and representations involving people's identity. This work aims to question the validity of the aforementioned and the power they can have in influencing how we look at others, ourselves and how this fragments and removes people's identity and humanity, by way of re-presenting the pre-existing images and portraits back to the viewer for consideration.

 

When drawing self-portraits my aim is to form personal, relatable and intimate relationships and social interactions between myself, the image, the object and the viewer by making the documented private life and day-to-day fleeting moment’s public. This work also aims to confront my own personal obstacles and anxieties of interacting with others.

I also use self-portraiture for self-introspection via intense drawing processes and visual scrutiny. By putting these drawings on display I aim to confront my own social anxieties of being viewed or looked at.

 

I also draw portraits from found images to form unknown relationships or partnerships between myself, the individuals and elements in the picture and finally the viewer. My aim is to make these images and relatable transient day-to-day moments, surroundings and people a focal point to be shared, consider and celebrated. This gives the opportunity for the viewer and myself to consider our own everyday moments and our place in them in a more focused and appreciative way.

 

In my work I am interested in using, re-presenting and re-contextualising ready-made appropriated images. My aim is to recreate the pre-existing images visual qualities and visual languages via meticulous drawings. Through this process the images can be experienced by the viewer in a new and different way, through a slower and more intimate process of looking. Via their re-contextualisation and re-presentation I aim to draw attention to what is usually overlooked in an image and highlight the relationship between representation and reality.