Edmund Prizeman

My work includes a varied range of media depending on the desired outcome. Currently I’m exploring how people interact with objects and how to commodify my personal practice with an interdisciplinary package. There are different facets that operate symbiotically within umbrella practice.

Making art for yourself is a way to improve self value and enables a direction. But in terms of having a sustainable professional practice you need to make work for other people that will pay you for it to carry on beyond more solipsistic navel gazing. Artists can make a living out of visually heightening our encapsulated environment and to do this you need to finding your style and make money from it. Without any particular narrative, the intentions of my two dimensional work are to provide visual pleasure and delight: playing with the brain; colours together to make you tick; compositions and satisfying strokes; casting illusions of space tricking the viewers; deception; squeezing the viewer/consumer into satisfaction; creating a formula for nice things through visual designs.

We live in a world with an excess of consumption, eating up the planet’s resources and space. Art is yet another area of consumption, it is a currency that is valued and exchanged and serves to reinforce the social inequalities of capitalism. Practising ‘successful’ artists create a commodity that is valued and exchanged within pockets in the world. I struggle with this, there is a definite demand with the current climate situation, to rethink making yet more work to be consumed by the art world.

In my Biblical Bikes project: the bikes I sell were once destined for the bin, with a bit of love they can again be used every day. In an exchange of money and bikes I can fill my belly and also attend to what people use every day, producing practical tools. There is a constant demand for bikes as a medium of transport. I can use my art making ability and skills to fix things. Through building relationships with customers the Biblical Bikes project builds a social network that is both eco-friendly, limiting carbon emissions and counteracting our throw away culture.

With this thought; by curating as well as producing a range of products including those that support the higher art game I’d like to believe I’m working towards creating a sustainable art practice with the ingredients of longevity, design, resourcefulness, community and repairing. The reality of the capitalist world asks that if we are going to be more loving and eco friendly it needs also to be profitable. I produce various tools that contribute to how societies function. My artistic outputs themselves can be understood as a catalyst in enabling communities to function positively. As an artist I aim to embrace the duality of my role: both trying to fix this world and create reward for my labour.

I have been responding to mine and my peer groups interest of partying.I have been installing kinetic lights to heighten the visual experience of such an event. There is something interesting about a visual artist focusing on the curation light because all we see is just what light has been in reflected back in to our retina. So by producing light as an art form is raw compact unexpectable experience.It also is a very accessible form of art that people respond to the explosive entertainment, visually exiting spectacles with relevant collaboration of exiting contemporary music.