Samuel Padfield

My work responds to the image, its hypnotic qualities, and its power to elicit stereotypic behaviour. Pieces playfully exist between sculpture and an expanded field of painting. My work positions itself in relation to the image as a static yet volatile state of becoming. There is an attempt to find stability within this precariousness. Through the use of textures and membranes, plays of opacities and transparencies, the work settles in the threshold. There is a mistrust of the image as presented by the screen, but there is also a fatigue from the constant withdrawal. There is banality in the digital sublime, but a banality that is at the same time irresistible and anxiety inducing.  An urgency for a critique of the image presents itself within a culture of optics and performativity, and when the images' support structures are obscured or seemingly invisible.