Grant Bellamy: Artistic Statement

Admin

April 2

Grant Bellamy is an emerging artist working on the unceded land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, Sydney. He is a recent graduate of the National Art School where he obtained his Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in painting. Bellamy primarily works in oil paint with a focus on the figure and his work has been featured in local group exhibitions around Sydney. Talking about his work Bellamy says:

Since graduating from NAS, I continue to develop my material and conceptual practice. I primarily work in oils, with a focus on the male figure. My paintings are dark but colourful, favouring blues, and they oscillate between naturalistic and illustrative.

My practice is concerned with 'states of being in between' or the liminal and its relation to identity. I attempt to render situations where there are lapses in understanding of one's identity and the contradictory feelings that arise from that: on the one hand it can be threatening and distressing but simultaneously freeing, powerful, even humorous.

The vessel for this in my work manifests as the figure of the Clown. The figures don pointed hats, silly shoes, frills, and heart-patterned boxers.

My Clown imagery is informed by cross cultural histories in which figures of Clowns have been facilitators of ritual, as well as mediators able to bridge divides of the material and immaterial through people's laughter at their performance. Clowns inhabit the liminal, the ambiguous, and the uncanny due to their humorous role, and this is the basis for my representation of them in my work.

My recent series of paintings in particular emphasises figures wearing heart-patterned boxers, a visual gag inherited from the cartoons I grew up with. This ubiquitous trope's humour comes from emasculating the subject. To my mind, the boxers are a symbol of a lapse in one's identity at the mercy of others, existing between various social roles and expectations.