Chris Webster

Analysis of Love
Waterless Lithography: Photoplate
1 Run
105mm x 85mm
2004

The work I make is an exploration of the dark and strange places of memory and the unconscious. I am interested in entropy and the dissipation of things over time. In these spaces the re-contextualised object through collage and print becomes an evocative story-telling medium, an updated Grimm’s fairytale, where the photograph/object as memento mori merges with the suggestion of other presences.

Folk tales, childhood memories, a meeting with a Navaho shaman; political traumas, automatic writing, experiments with chemicals; spirit photographs, dream states, the encoded and multifaceted symbols of alchemy; all have been influential in the assemblage that makes up my work.

Chris Webster 2005

“And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well…and you must be instructed to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?).” Peter Ackroyd. Hawksmoor. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1985. pp.5-6.

Artist website