Jonathan Armour
Artist @ The Armour Studio
Jonathan Armour’s (IE) practice builds from a previous career in engineering and is an interplay between digital and oil-based works, including mappings of non-normative bodies, and digital investigations of the human body as a celebrated, objectified, abstracted form.
Often the work is driven by a desire to get under the skin, to pare away the superficial and reveal the substance, but it can be an urge to access the entire surface of the body in one go, to map the body like as terrain and to inspect its geography.
His practice involves collaboration with real people and invokes two sides of my brain. The scientific side interrogates digitised bodies, often resulting in time-based works – underpinned by an urge to make the pixel more visceral. The instinctive side of my brain has developed skills in oil painting – chosen for its ability to become flesh on the canvas.
He sees the skin as an interface between the person within and the world around us.
Sometimes the work confronts the viewer with a particular human issue. For example the seminal work “Infinite Surface” made in collaboration with Prof. Richard Sawdon Smith, challenges the stigma attached to living with HIV. The development of this film into a VR installation was supported by the pharmaceutical company Gilead, the main provider of PrEP.
His work has been exhibited widely in the UK, Europe, Australia and USA.