Sean Payne - 'Boneland'

Wednesday 2 - Saturday 19 December 2020

Boneland is a geography of an imagined country, contour maps of a familiar yet uncanny physical feature. The simile is of bone to rock, the physiological and the geological, a hypothetical landscape.

We all know what one looks like yet most of us will never see a real skull, let alone the one we own. Yet we see it everywhere, stripped of its peculiarity and reproduced as a sign on every variety of consumer product, a visual cliché and yet not one completely without power to move. One of Sean Payne's intentions with this series of drawings is to reconsider the thing itself, as opposed to the sign, and to wonder if it still has currency.

The artist started this investigation from a simple itch to address something representational again, yet Payne has come to understand in retrospect that the impulse came from his state of mind and that the choice of signifier was not accidental.