David Shrigley |
Who is David Shrigley and what does he want? England's best-known doodler was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1968. He studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art where he graduated in 1991. He still resides in Glasgow. After several failed attempts to be published as a cartoonist in the style of Gary Larson, Shrigley set about publishing books of his drawings and has to date produced over 20 titles through his own imprint, Armpit Press and other publishers. If we are to take David Shrigley's animated film of the same name quite literally, we might think of him as a sadistic psychopath who lives in the woods. But Who I Am and What I Want ( co-directed with Chris Shepherd) is simply the outpourings of a delightfully twisted imagination, which extends itself to drawings, books and sculptures. Shrigley has a unique worldview - a slightly autistic, perverse and unfiltered understanding of the human condition and it's sometimes painful struggle with existence. His spidery meanderings in pen and ink present us with surreal scenarios that mirror our subconscious desires and fears. A community of misfits, beasts and tortured animals, explore moral themes such as good, evil, love, hate, life and death. Word and image co-exist in Shrigley's work; his drawings are annotated with lists and diagrams and his animations are narrated with spoken word. On occasion text takes over from the image completely and mistakes, misspellings and incongruities become part of the drawings and add to their subconscious quality. But despite the weight he attributes to the written, Shrigley rarely uses text to make sense of the image, and similarly, the image never quite illustrates the text it accompanies. He consistently denies us a straightforward narrative and invites us to project our own readings onto his work. Caged creatures preoccupy Shrigley in his sculptures Pet Carrier No.2 and Cat Basket No.2 . In both works we are presented with a frozen narrative, a moment after the fact. Yellow slime oozes out of the enclosures provoking our curiosity as to the fate of the former occupants. Whether they were liquidized with a laser gun or the hapless causalities of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong is up to the viewer to decide. Shrigley presents us with a scene that is as comic as it is tragic and it is precisely his ability to conjure this juxtaposition of emotions that makes his work so human. |