Tom Bull

b. 1995, Northampton, UK

Lives and works in London

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Statement

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Located on the cusp of communication, I work to explore the complexities of reading and making. Through moving image, photography, performance and sculpture, my works unfold a performative inquiry that is concerned with the tension, or slippage between fiction and representation, acting and being, form and sensitivity. Playing within pre-existing disciplines, such as model making, amateur dramatics, literature and self-portraiture, I explore the vulnerability of a work and how it requires support, or whether in its instilled fallibilities, it becomes unstable, rhizomatic; unable to yield a definitive position. My works hold these complexities, not just imitating life but requiring it, for it does not seek answers to these ambiguities, it plays with it as a visual medium.

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Since graduating in 2018, I have become part of an Associate Studio Programme in collaboration with Acme Studios. An invaluable two-year platform that has given me the time and space to sit with my work more intimately. A generative studio environment that has prompted a more pointed and mature approach to making, reading and examining my role as an Artist. A setting that allowed me not to break away from my previous studies, but to build upon my nomadic way of generating work, by enquiring into pivotal points that are then confronted and worked upon, or by creating contradictive forms that stop and turn the structure of the work, and thereby the readership of it. A sculptural treatment that has given life to a line of enquiry that grapples with volatile methodologies and the overtly obtuse positioning of myself amidst the work, in order to confront, contort and generally toy with ideas of authenticity, representation, discourse and literacy.

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