11. 11
Paintings
“…This work presents an invitation by the gentle manipulation of the audience into another
world. Another space contrary to the space of the everyday…”
Lee Rose, Curator
19. 19
“With the deft hand of a bedroom turntablist, Priest mixes, collides and transforms the
visual scurf of the everyday into something extraordinary, strange and unsettling...”
Tom Ireland, Curator
Pen & Ink
24. 24
Sketchbook
“It is a constant idea of mine that behind the cotton wool (of daily reality) is a hidden pattern; that
we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that
we are parts of the work of art.”
Virginia Woolf
30. 30
IRIS PRIEST
Illustrator//artist//writer
i.priest1@arts.ac.uk
07512354692
@irispriest
My practice is bound up with the exploration of art and drawing as channels for discovery, for the cross-pollination of ideas and as a new means of
communication. What connects the various aspects of my work – painting, sculpture, writing, curation, photography and site-responsive drawing – is an
ongoing philosophical enquiry into the structures which underlie our everyday existence.
My visual work is often laboriously and highly crafted as a means for redrawing – and potentially disrupting or volatilizing - the 'banal' images and materials
of the every day. I am interested in the frontiers (or limits) of human kinds' understanding of the universe, and how, or whether, art and science can be
taken beyond themselves in order to imagine the unimaginable and make manifest the ineffable or immaterial. Much of my work represented in this
portfolio explores, in different ways, the relativity and ephemerality of scientific or artistic invention and the ways in which past ideas, ideologies and
aesthetic movements can draw parallels to current times, thereby shaking the seeming infallibility of our currently held positions, ideologies and beliefs.
As an artist, writer and curator I am increasingly concerned with promoting and nurturing a greater synergy between practitioners from different disciplines
(visual art, writing, philosophy, science and education). In my curatorial projects, editorial role (CANNED Magazine) and recent writing commissions I have
been exploring an evolutionary principle of ideas as propagated by collective knowledge sharing, collaboration and exchange which I am introducing to the
development of new works.
