Flump Up Print

Mark is an English artist who received his Masters in Painting and Drawing from Chelsea School of Art, London. He is currently very much in love with the city Bucharest, Romania, in which he has lived for the past eight years. "˜My practice is a direct response to living in Bucharest. I explore states of impermanence and the resulting aesthetic. In the past few years newly erected shopping malls have popped up in the city enticing us in. They offer a hyper-real, super-beautiful sense of certainty, purpose and fixedness. Yet conversely, the static quality, artificiality and homogeneity of these dwellings leaves one feeling unnerved and disconnected from reality. Meanwhile in the old city, buildings crumble, facades crack and deterioration is pervasive. Nothing stands still. As the aging architecture submits to the elements it fashions a genuine beauty. This feels honest, and the patterns of cracks and eroding surfaces act as a metaphor, mirroring what it is to exist, to experience and to be temporal. Thus my practice is centered on the passing of time, on instability and change. It is an attempt to respond to the transient present rather than to conjure up some notion of immortality. This philosophy is carried through into my working methods and I have devised a process that allows for control as well as accident. Subsequently, a dialogue is formed between the content and the medium. The volitional outcome of the work reflects the dichotomy that exists between the tangible and the ethereal and between one's sense of location and dislocation. My aim is to arrive at an orderly disorderliness or disorderly orderliness.