Green Pagoda
Jonathan McCree

Jonathan McCree has been visiting DKUK for 8 years for regular haircuts. Not many understand; how it feels to sit in the chair at DKUK as well as this.

‘This exhibition is an unusual opportunity for me to show work from various areas of my practice.

Perhaps I am a multi-disciplinary artist because when I start on a project, I’m rarely clear in my mind where I will end up. I think of the uncertainty as energy and this is often most apparent to me when I collaborate. Collaboration is an opportunity to give up something of what I think I might know in order to see where someone else might take my ideas.

In my imagination, everything exists in a constant state of conversation and exchange. I am always seeing the potential for taking marks, forms and colours in new directions and across media.

The primary concern of my studio practice is to generate sensations from an encounter with colour, weight, surface, texture and space.

I work in a variety of materials, predominantly cardboard and metal and then cardboard sand cast in metal. Casting is about both preserving and transforming. I am making something that is both more and less real at the same time. On the one hand, the piece is a reproduction, a copy of something, yet at the same time it is more solid and durable.

I am hoping to create tension around truth, authenticity and value, which isn’t easily resolved. I hope this creates an ambiguity around our experience of the work, where we are fluctuating between the knowledge of something real and the sense of something symbolic, between what you think something is and what you feel it might be. The illusion creates a dynamic interplay between two systems of understanding. I think that my practice and this show, in particular, works across these parallel realms.’