Miles Hendricks

I make drawings, paintings, prints and a little bit of sculpture. I'm currently working on a bestiary of shape-shifters that transform in and out of abstraction.  Sometimes I draw from the tropes and pseudo-ancient iconography of the “fantasy” genre. I like how the genre can act as a cartoonish meta-mythology weaving real and imagined histories. I’m inspired by cartoon physics and the playfully fluid ontological status of animated cartoon characters. In cartoon-space semiotics and ontology are one and the same. In animated cartoons these tensions are often extended into visual gags, but for me cartoon metaphysics is no laughing matter!    I often begin by visualising airy compositional motions and then imagining different figures to contour that movement and give it form.  Capturing this imagined animation requires freezing it, flattening it and squeezing it into the picture frame.  Sometimes the figures are barely materialised, or become obscured in a storm of abstraction forming around them. It’s a slightly backwards kind of formalism where abstraction precedes figuration.