Biography
Michael Eden is a visual artist, researcher and writer exploring relationships between monstrosity, subjectivity and landscape representation. Eden’s art practice is focussed on semi abstract figurative and landscape painting, but also incorporates ceramic sculpture and constructions. Eden employs theories and representations of eeriness and flux as critiques of returning fascistic right-wing ideologies, identified in overt political discourse and implicit in much popular culture. Eden obtained his PhD from Middlesex University where his project ranged across various disciplines: contemporary art criticism and its relationship to histories of modernism, medieval literature, theories of landscape and space, notions of national myth making, and monster studies: bringing these together through the lens of art practice. Key exemplars informing his critique are the influential and progressive medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (circa 1370) and the problematic modernism of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). Eden contributes to academic journals writing about art practice, film, monstrosity, and approaches to arts learning; and he has engaged in polemics and rhetoric in less formal journalistic output. Eden is a fellow of The Digswell Arts Trust and a former editor of the arts and culture publication Trebuchet Magazine.
