I am confused about what we’re all doing here. I’ve learnt to revel in this confusing thing. Confusion is my tool, my thing, how my art is powered. None of my works here are answering a question. They are only pathetic attempts and expressions of a grasping, an approaching, at some sort of existential meaning or comment. In using certain materials and signs, I hope to approach a language that describes and ascribes tone and feeling in a way that is authentic to the idea. The vague idea is being honest, being allowed to see oneself and others as infantile and also heroic, as actors or robots of small destruction and creation, of adding up, or of disappearing, of being small, and jumping on anthills.
“I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.”
Kurt Vonnegut “Physicist, Purge Thyself” in the Chicago Tribune Magazine (22 June 1969)
Loki Groves, The Other Guys 2013, Modelling clay, timber and plastic bag, Dimensions Variable