Will Sweeney ”Vorpal Sword”

Diesel Art Gallery

Finished

Artists

Will Sweeney

Artist Will Sweeney presents a retro/futuristic English landscape mutated beyond recognition and populated by mythical creatures and freakish characters living in makeshift shelters, conducting strange rituals and harvesting the polluted soil. Meanwhile, the urban centres have fallen to ruin and decadence, ruled by a twisted elite that exploits the populace for food and entertainment. Monsters real and imagined roam the landscape, and only those able to wield The Vorpal Sword stand a chance of defeating them. These new works are rendered in garish colour and in a larger scale than much of Sweeney’s previous work. Using watercolour, gel marker brush and ink, he has developed a looser, more freeform style in these pieces.

Other works in the show include a series of small-scale paintings of tiny universes which display Sweeney’s fascination with biological and medical illustration, depicting visions of worlds within worlds, cross sections of alien organisms and alien technology from eldritch dimensions. These paintings were generated from free-flowing ink paintings and refined with ballpoint pen to create an otherworldly atmosphere that suggests 1970s science fiction art, coral reefs and primitive structures hewn from an alien substance. In addition there will be a new animation piece made in collaboration with London artist/musician Subway Lung and several older, unseen pieces, sketch books and collected ephemera from Sweeney’s archive. The title Vorpal Sword signifies a vital creative energy, a life-force beaming directly from the subconscious which will vanquish monsters and destructive forces. The painting “Energy Cannot Be Destroyed” perhaps represents the idea behind the title best, a chaotic maze of mutated machines and strange objects bursting and sputtering volatile substances in a feedback loop of demented propulsion. The monsters of mundanity and inertia are defeated by the metaphysical blade of The Vorpal Sword. The life cycle goes on, cross-pollinating and evolving.

[Event]
Signings by Will Sweeney
Date: Mar. 3 (Sat) 15:00–17:00

Schedule

Mar 2 (Fri) 2018-May 24 (Thu) 2018