Stuart John Hine
Stuart has worked within the area of community arts for the past ten years. Currently his practice lends itself towards creating contextual visual art for the gallery space. Taking his experiences as a youth and community arts service provider his present work explores the area of identity, that of the individual and the group.
He is interested in representing those individuals or groups who have become marginalized, some excluded from regular social arenas and often from the community at large. His aim is to raise positive public profiles of such people, to elevate their social position and to celebrate their diversity.
In exploring portrait idioms and conventions traditionally reserved historically for the ruling classes, Stuart hopes to invert and critique their significance and provoke or to flip social and class ideals, placing people he finds to be the most fascinating at the top, regardless of their origins, and present them in a manner often reserved for the very highest elites.
Stuarts practice encompasses a number of disciplines including; ceramics, sand castings, print and painting. At present he is creating series of painted portraits. His medium is acrylics as he enjoys the irony of melding low art materials with high art practices such as the Italian renaissance.
Using unusual sitters and painting in an almost illustrative manner Stuart hopes to replicate something of the large, heavy gilt framed portraits we see within every civic building and gallery collections. His intention is to give a higher standing profile of the everyday man in a unique setting. He believes their histories are as important and worth celebrating too.
