Steve Lovegrove
Artist statement
Over the last three years or so, during very difficult times in my life, I roamed the banks of the River. I collected the gifts she offered up to me in physical and spiritual form, providing refuge from my depression. A place where I could be alone, without feeling alone. The River became my muse, my mentor, and my collaborator. She gave me the material to make art, supporting my belief that there is no excuse not to make art, regardless of circumstances.
Animosity and Liberty are two works from a larger series that resulted from my collecting practice. The objects I collect often sit with me for weeks or months or even years before they are incorporated into a final work. I work on multiple pieces at once, reviewing, revising, searching through my collections, finding new materials, adding an item, waiting for glue to dry. Leaving the work, returning later, till the collage tells me it’s done.
Title of the work:
1: Animosity
2: Liberty
Date: 2023
Biography
Steve has been an artist all his adult life, including a very long career as a photographer. Becoming disillusioned with digital photography and the obsession with perfection and the death of the photograph as a physical object, Steve embarked on a journey of discovery to embrace historical and alternative photographic processes with a key focus on the wet plate collodion technique from the late 1800’s. Much of Steve’s recent work involves using the wet plate process in the darkroom without a camera and making images from found and collected objects.
One of the recurring themes of his photography has been to photograph found and discarded objects and places. Collecting become a form of therapy, and he spent endless hours of the past several years wandering the banks of the River collecting anything that caught his eye. Pieces of wood, bones, glass, scraps of plastic and paper, toys, syringes.
Steve initially intended to photograph these objects, but as the collections grew, themes began to emerge that made more sense as three dimensional assemblages and collages, inspired by the concept of Wunderkammer (Cabinet of curiosities). His arts practice now embraces many historic photographic processes as well as assemblage and collage making.
URL: www.darkarts.com.au
Insta: darkarts_australia
