Oscar Paxton

When people ask me what my work is about I often struggle to answer, because my work is a direct response to myself. As in it is about what affects me emotionally. It is inherently personal, a response to the state of the world as I perceive it.

There are two levels on which my work operates. Firstly, it is informed by instances of what I understand as a general yet tangible rotting of societal functionality. The current systems we, as humans, encounter daily leave much to be desired. With this in mind, my body of work fixates on the actions of splitting and cracking, as a precursor to the crumble. As well as acts of concealment and intentional traces of absence.

The increasing loss of societies' functionality is a distressing topic for most people to think about. The other level on which my work operates is the incorporation of elements of lightness and nonsense. This tends to materialise in the odd self-portrait, to remind viewers that there is a person behind these objects. It also appears in a kind of light-hearted trickery. I include materials that are universally recognisable yet disrupted contextually. In this disruption, there is a displacement and an absence is forged.