The Cannonisation of HRH.the

Provocatively playful and deadly serious, “The Cannonisation of HRH.the” continues my concern to force body based subjectivity and textually fixed social meanings into a ‘telling’ synthesis (also epitomised by my dependence on a conceptual persona, HRH.the, through which I commit artistic ideas into material reality). In “The Cannonisation of HRH.the” words are taken -almost violently- at their imagistic implication: I employ an army of kitsch ornamental cannons to literally cannonise myself as a self-professed 'saintly' force exploding within the phallocentric ‘canon’ of Western art, releasing an intentioned romanticism around ‘art’ and the ‘miraculous.’ In such a way, the agency of words is pushed beyond the cultural norm and rendered temporarily absurd whilst such agency is simultaneously underscored as the very touch base of artistic origination per se.

The installation is composed of a projected performance-animation incorporating the artist’s own body holding and riffling through the pages of Janson’s canonical book ‘A History of Art’ (1962) which is framed by an army of miniature brass cannons. I hand drew on each photographic still to create animated cannon balls 'erupting out of the ornamental cannons' and landing against my chest to spell the suffragette motto: "Deeds Not Words"