Leisure World

A turquoise and lemon yellow beacon of guaranteed good times, seated high above the suburban sprawl of Hemel Hempstead, Leisure World was my adolescent Mecca of fun. Now faded to quieter shades of sky blue and primrose, with many of the jazzy signs becoming unkempt and tatty, it has become my personal allegory for the demystification of the world through the process of growing up. Leisure World still towers defiantly next to the flash new Snow Centre which is much slicker but no way as lovable as it's forefather. Something has been lost with time and it is this feeling of longing for the untouchable which I hope my work draws from and exudes it's own character and defiant presence on the wall.

 

My work celebrates commercial visuals which may be stylistically outdated, but retain a powerful presence through their innate dynamism. Working in a Post-Pop climate, I extract tropes from 90's graphics and encourage these toward formal excess through the process of digital drawing. Also holding a fascination with suburban leisure signage, the resultant works are exuberant collages of dynamic lines and calligraphic strokes colliding and compacting themselves onto their aluminium support. I see my work as a simultaneous deconstruction and veneration of mass visuals, becoming retro yet progressive at the same time.

 

Floating in space, these cut-outs behave as signs without particular meaning but instead emanate an unutterable sense of boldness and dynamism. Miming 90's 'Naff Graphics' and turning them to face the world in their new guise as artworks, this is the point at which the everyday becomes exotic and the familiar fantastic.

 

This is not simple sampling of popular imagery however; there is no 'cut and paste' involved, instead a more personal language is developed through their digital drawing on a tablet PC. As gestural marks collide with angular frameworks, I hope for clear and inventive visions to arise from the congealed detritus of consumerist imagery which I absorb on a daily basis. Whilst the input may come from the cloud of mass culture, these are each definite personalised statements, holding their own ground. The 'look of leisure' is mined and exploded, with hopeful and entertaining works resulting from this. Through my work I hope to re-mystify the visual world and produce oracles for our own times - a new form of constructivism for 2012.

 

 

-Nicky Carvell, 2010