Tom Cardwell: Kvltvrgeist Remaster
Tom Cardwell’s banner artworks, inspired by the streetscape of Helsinki, are on display near Kiasma during the festival Saturday.
About
The city itself is the anonymous and multiple
author of the images collected and exhibited as artworks’– Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, 2002.
These large-scale banner artworks are created in direct response to the decoration found around the streets of Helsinki. In public space, diverse tableaux are created by multiple authors using posters, stickers and graffiti. Particular spaces in the city are appropriated as informal message boards, where agendas are promoted and discourses negotiated. Often, these take place on the housings for electrical junction boxes, municipal signs or building hoardings. These examples are highly aesthetic, organised within regularly shaped areas that perform the function of the canvas painting support in delineating the composition and balancing the dynamic, even chaotic, styles at play within formal edges.
In response, Tom Cardwell has created a series of detailed paintings that follow the style of ‘quodlibet’ still life paintings popular in the Dutch Golden Age. Elements from Helsinki’s streets are carefully transcribed and recontextualised within paintings that are dense with coded symbolism and evocative imagery. Here, the painted elements are juxtaposed in larger digital compositions used to create exterior fabric banners. In this way, the source imagery is returned to its urban context on the streets of the city.
Artist
Tom Cardwell is an artist and researcher based in London, UK. His paintings focus on DIY subcultures using detailed representations to recontextualise contemporary artefacts such as clothing, posters and stickers, connecting these with historic traditions.
From 2022-23 Cardwell was Kone Arts Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies where he researched the urban ‘message boards’ found on the streets of Helsinki. This project resulted in a series of paintings, large scale public artworks and a journal article.
Cardwell’s book Heavy Metal Armour (Intellect, 2022) and PhD thesis (University of the Arts London, 2017) employed painting practice and ethnography to examine the customised ‘battle jackets’ made by heavy metal fans. His research interests include contemporary and historic painting, subcultural symbolism and expressions of personal narrative and identity in popular image traditions.
Cardwell’s artworks have been exhibited in many countries including the UK, Finland, USA, Germany, Austria and Brazil. He is Senior Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell, University of the Arts London.