Craig M. Edwards
Craig M Edwards | The Keeper of the Estate| C-type | Triptych 120 x 40 cm
At the heart of Edwards’s practice is an ongoing investigation into the opposition of the urban and the rural. Influenced by the writings of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, he is interested in how the creative act, or performativity of the process of art production can be used to deconstruct cultural ‘myths’. As a triptych The Gamekeeper depicts an archetypal gamekeeper morphing into a stereotypical ‘urban white working class man’. Embracing this method of showing the viewer the process behind making the work, including various juxtapositions of signifiers and signs of the urban and the rural, Edwards not only deconstructs wider binary opposition, but experiments with visual methods of deconstruction. Having come from a background in Cultural Studies and Photography. Edwards is influenced by debates around the use and formation of visual ‘signs’, attempting to question their composition and apparently ‘natural’ relationship with wider cultural ‘myths’.