Artist's Statement

Michael Pinchbeck
Artist’s Statement

My work is both an illustration of loss and an autopsy of experience. I operate autobiographically by using self and site-as-source to create narratives about what is not there.

I aim to challenge conventions of the chosen artform; text, performance, film or installation, to uncover the content, explore bits in between and remove pieces of the puzzle. I am interested in moments when the work ceases to mean and how we can reconfigure the meaning at these moments.

For my MA, I am investigating the presence of pretence and absence as substance in performance and installation with reference to work by Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Ilya Kabakov and Aneta Grzeszykowska. I have devised a site-specific project as an act of communion between research and practice, absence and presence, amateur and academic. The project involves a devised performance in a local church by the amateur dramatics group with whom I performed my first play. At the same time, I will exhibit an installation with their stage, playing stage directions from previous productions with silences where there were lines.