Tom G Adriani

  Your body is an extension
  Tom G Adriani, Kenophobia –
Fear of Throwing Anything Away (2009), Pen on Paper

Adriani graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2005. Since then he has exhibited widely within the UK. He lives and works in London.

Reem Fekri: Describe the development of your work aesthetically and conceptually?

Tom G Adriani: Whenever I cast my mind through the work I have done, I realize that there are a great many core themes and ideas that seem to bubble up to the surface. Loss or being lost is possibly the most common of all these bubbles of thought. These ideas are not so apparent to me in the moment of making a piece of work but on retrospect it is clear they are ever present. I believe that conceptually my work deals with the same kind of thoughts I have been having all my life, it is just they are becoming clearer and clearer.

After leaving college I dedicated three years to working only in pen, to try and get my head around what black ink on white paper really is and to strip everything down to its bare bones. Now I feel that I am able to flesh these skeletons out and am developing ways to bring them into life.

RF: You create fantastic yet somewhat unearthly illustrations of dark, creepy characters in awkward, dingy locations through convoluted story lines. It seems as though there is continuous binary battles between good/evil and death/life. Where and how do your ideas develop?

TGA: My first memories of life were playing with a large collection of toy cars and soldiers. Each one had a name and a very different personality in accordance to it's physique. I realise now that each character reflected a different fragment of my own mind. Like most other young children during play, as a story grows, all awareness of ones body and the outer world disappears. My characters would move deep into lands and scenarios that battled between good and evil, heroism and fear, life and death. To this day, my characters and the stories I watch them in explore the same regions of myself as those of my childhood.

Any idea can hit me at any time. That is the really exiting thing for me. Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night with the words 'I made the machine so it would love me, but now I know the machine will never love me' running around and around my head. I don't know where these words came from in myself, like most of my favourite ideas, they seem to find me. One thing I do know is that they make sense to me and as a result, today I will find it very easy to illustrate the picture they make in my head. I believe such thoughts come from a guarded area of my consciousness; I can just imagine two burly uniformed watchmen who stand guard outside these grand golden gates which are the entrance to an enormous dimly lit cave. I hang around taking photographs, doing the whole tourist thing, and then, as soon as the watchmen are distracted or having a nap, I dash in through a hole in the gate and into my subconscious cave. Inside, and out of breath, I frantically stuff as many brightly coloured ideas as I can fit into my pockets, and disappear back into the real world.

RF: Is there an initial planning stage when you create new characters and storylines or do you work more sporadically?

TGA: I find if I try to plan anything out in too much detail it dies a death. Even if I tell someone about a story or picture before I have made it then it's gone. I think this is because my need to communicate the idea has been fulfilled, even if it is just to one person.

RF: Alistar Robinson of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art described your work as being of childlike innocence merged with a sinister sense of threat and malice. The paradoxes created within your illustrations keep us alert and searching for more, through the complex journeys and narratives that take place. Could you take me through a piece of work that best describes this?

TGA: I think an animation of mine called 'Pascal' is a good example of such paradoxes. It is a tale of a young boy who has to deal with the death of his best friend. It is told in a humorous and gentle tone and treats a traumatic event with light hearted flippancy, just as most fairy tales do.

I believe one of the reasons fairy tales are so successful in filtering into our subconscious is because we are spoken to like children. Anything is possible in the world of a child, and when an adult hears a story that is indicative of their own childhood, they tend to turn off all the concrete beliefs that they have accumulated over their lifetime and become momentarily open again; able to absorb metaphorical language without a voice in their head telling them that a scenario is ludicrous.

No Two Burns Are the Same
 

In the animation, Pascal finds himself obsessively remembering his deceased friend, unable to comprehend his loss. These memories manifest themselves in the form of the ghost of his friend and it follows him everywhere. After some time Pascal finds that more and more of the people he knows to have died begin to hang around with him, including his grandparents, the neighbour and the old dog. Now I must say I do not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in memory and trauma. The concept of a ghost simply acts as a vehicle for me to talk about these things.

RF: Perhaps what is most unsettling about your work is the characters have undergone some form of mental and physical change, and are placed in areas of cities which are often forgotten or ignored such as sewers, cellars and dingy alleyways. Is part of your artistic practice trying to uncover an uncomfortable reality existing within every city, every culture, that we chose to ignore?

TGA: I think that these kind of lost places and characters can be seen to represent dark regions of our subconscious. (Ourselves). Our wants and guilts are things that society tries to manage and organize for us. I believe that art can encourage individuals to explore these dark (and often scary) patches of themselves. This promotes self-analysis and understanding. It tells us not to be fearful of what they are and says that you are not alone; other people are making the same journeys into themselves.

RF:You curated and exhibited at a show called Tales from the Electric Forest at the St Pancras Crypt Gallery recently, where I felt your work fitted in perfectly with its surroundings.

TGA: I wanted to create a show exploring contemporary fairy tales in the city with a particular emphasis on strange and monstrous characters. I collected 14 other artists from around the country who were equally fascinated by such creatures. I find it amazing that so many people are thinking along and working in such similar ways without the knowledge of one another. It really is good evidence of our collective subconscious.

Mirage    
Tom G Adriani, The Burrows (2009), Pen on Paper    

 


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