Michael Shepherd investigates what academic Camille Paglia terms "the claytonic" - the earth beneath one's feet. Fittingly, his new paintings feature ironsand, seed and even dead bees embedded in their surfaces, foregrounding the finer details of our native ecologies. The exhibition title Suppose the future fails is a line from Owl's Clover, a Wallace Stevens poem which offers a critique of modernism and human hubris. The paintings feature standing engines, machines which took on imaginary, anthropomorphised roles in Shepherd's childhood, and are placed back in the environments in which he first encountered them, reflecting on generations of men who coveted these engines and whose identities were indelibly linked to them.
Michael Shepherd investigates what academic Camille Paglia terms "the claytonic" - the earth beneath one's feet. Fittingly, his new paintings feature ironsand, seed and even dead bees embedded in their surfaces, foregrounding the finer details of our native ecologies. The exhibition title Suppose the future fails is a line from Owl's Clover, a Wallace Stevens poem which offers a critique of modernism and human hubris. The paintings feature standing engines, machines which took on imaginary, anthropomorphised roles in Shepherd's childhood, and are placed back in the environments in which he first encountered them, reflecting on generations of men who coveted these engines and whose identities were indelibly linked to them.
