UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Profile 2014 - Joe Presland

Tell us what your work is about and what informs it

I am interested in materiality and in the subjective process of aesthetic exploration. This is a process that is completely engrossing and personal. I try not to prefigure or conceptualise when I make the work. I want my work to be raw, and very much my interpretation and configuration of what I am responding to and working with. This absolute subjectivity has an honesty, it is not trying to be anything else. 
I have always been fascinated by a kind of unconventional beauty and I am always drawn towards imperfections and unique scars. The works I show are often damaged, deteriorating or dirty, and I use fragments of found images as well as things that I document and recycle. I am interested in the approach to  paintings made by Jean Michel Basquiat and Oscar Murillo, and I have really become interested in outsider artists, people working oblivious to the art world because of the surprising things that come out of their work. Finding your own process and language is important and so anyone that has developed their own way of making work to do something interesting would be attractive to me. Painting and making art in general is the artist's need to express their unique life experiences. Good artists are always looking to break boundary's with their work and rearranging reality and changing the value of things. Art is a celebration of dreams and disorder that liberates and elevates the viewer / maker from the confines of reality.

Artists who use appropriation and found object pieces directly from their environment, or what they encounter has always excited me. I like the idea of literally, pealing away part of the street, or atmosphere and putting into a gallery environment. I have collections of materials from pretty much everywhere I go, to digest into my work.

Collaging, isolating objects and elements changes their value, and allows us to look at them in a new way and reflect on what is going on or how things can be turned around.

I like to work with the by products or waste of my studio practice, and life in general. Often collecting materials from the floor, and outside world. objects and images from pop culture can occasionally appear in my work in a weathered, regurgitated way.

What do you think is the most significant thing that has helped you during your time a UCA 

Farnham?

Breaking my practice down and writing about my work and ideas has really helped me    

define what interests me. Also talks and conversations with tutors and other students about 

art has definitely been very positive and will stay with me for a long time. During the final

exhibition it was interesting how isolating and arranging some selected works can really 

make you notice them in a new light. The curating of works for exhibition is very much like 

the composition of the collage and paintings that I produce, but more complex, so the final 

exhibition at Farnham helped me think about my work in new way.

What next ?

Recently I have been making a lot of quick drawings and paintings from life. I have plans to 

get a larger studio space, so I can work on some large canvases and collages on the floor 

before stretching them. I want to continue exploring and developing, I am excited to see what 

my work will change into in the future. I want to build on the experience that exhibiting has 

given me from the final shows this year and exhibiting in London and Amsterdam.