James Irwin

Profession

Associate Lecturer, MA Illustration and Visual Media

College

London College of Communication

Email address

j.irwin@lcc.arts.ac.uk

Person Type

Staff

Biography

James Irwin is an artist living and working in London, and is an Associate Lecturer on MA Illustration and Visual Media. He has a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Newcastle University, and an MFA in Computational Studio Arts from Goldsmith's, University of London.

He was awarded the 2012 Emerging Artists Bursary Award by the Royal British Society of Sculptors, and has exhibited widely across the UK.

Solo exhibitions include Listening to Xanax, Gossamer Fog, London (2018), Binary Translations, Space In Between, London (2013) and Hopeless Communication, Space In Between (2011). Web projects include The Edge, skelf.org.uk (2018), Spread the Virus, dateagle.art (2018) and Could Ecopsychology cure my Cyberchondria, spaceinbetween.co.uk (2016). Group exhibitions include Terms and Conditions May Apply, Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2018), Home Alone, Dateagleart, London (2018), How the mind comes to be furnished (collaborative project with Lilah Fowler), Space In Between (2016) and Let’s Pluck the Bird, Limoncello (London (2013).

He is a PhD candidate at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston School of Art where he is using printmaking and the moving image to research authenticity within post digital image making.

His work investigates the capacity of physical and digital media to evoke/provoke authentic experience in a post truth context where anxiety and uncertainty become valid or unavoidable creative positions.

Using digital media, printmaking, sculpture, sound and moving image, he reworks and manipulates content from on and offline sources to shift or skew the relationship between the physical world and it’s digital image. The resulting art objects are often over-mediated, and become saturated with artefacts of the making process.

As a record of this overworking the anxiety undermining the art work becomes foregrounded as sincere or authentic, with remnants of content sifted out through varying forms of filtration. In doing so he attempts to destabilise the media through which we create alternate digital realities.

Recent examples include a networked robotic work that creates a soundscape of human breathing as robots take turns to navigate their way around desktops, and a series of prints and moving image works that remediate Thomas Vinterberg’s original Dogme95 film ‘Festen’.

Between 2017 and 2019 he organised and curated a series of web-based exhibitions pairing US and UK artists and writers in an attempt to map a human-centric materiality of the Internet. SuperHumanCorporation: An Exploration of Digital Nature includes newly commissioned art work and writing by Rowena Harris (UK), Nicholas O’Brien (US), Andrew Benson (US), Laura Davidson (UK) and Brenna Murphy (US). The series was hosted by Space In Between and Isthisit?

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