Alistair Ewen’s recent art works are mixed media assemblages centred on recycled artefacts, ‘found objects’, or ‘relics’ inherited from past family generations. The ‘found objects’ are often taken from what other people have thrown out onto pavements, or recycled from his previous art works and then re-used in new works. Sometimes he combines these artefacts with other media such as photographs or maps. 

 

He is concerned with giving visual expression to evocative qualities: to what resonates in artefacts, memories, dreams, or old family photographs and the meanings thereby suggested: a way of visually articulating his experience over time.

 

He uses notebook and camera rather than a sketch book: recording and exploring ideas and imagery through writing and photography. No preparatory drawings are made: instead he creates arrangements of the physical elements of the work: strange combinations of things that aren’t normally related, so invite fresh interpretations. These arrangements evolve during the process of making: some elements may be discarded and new ones, which may include light or sound may be added.

 

He sees this process as akin to mourning: situating these artefacts and images in a structure that evokes a narrative, which ‘holds’ them in an elegiac history. In this work he is also exploring those qualities of beauty that often go un-noticed in small scale engineering.

 

Influences on his work include museum displays of engineering models in glazed cabinets, which later resonated for him when he first saw the vitrines of Joseph Beuys. He perceived the prominence of works of engineering in the landscape. as introducing an alien quality to it, which later resonated in the landscape paintings of Paul Nash and Prunella Clough and in the work of Antoni Tapies and Anselm Kiefer.