A Crown is Just a Hat that Lets the Rain

source: saatchigallery
My practice deals with the rhetoric of image making, the figure within the urban landscape and how objects and totemic gestures (such as flags, statues or plinths) are used within an environment as a means of demonstrating power and control. Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, spoken word and sound, the work attempts to heighten and question the experience of what it means to stand in front of something that has been made with the express intention of supporting, qualifying or glorifying an ideal of authority, placing its viewer under a state of subordination.
By employing the motifs of figurative art (and by this I mean figurative as the rhetorical intentions of art that represents an ideal), patriarchal depictions of masculinity and nationhood, my practice creates large-scale sculptures with the express intention of undermining them and, through humour, rendering them absurd and dumb.
In so being, rather than a call to arms, the works become punching bags, broken and fragmented heroes; where spoilt materiality and besmirched surfaces replace the norm. They become a fallout from cultural conditioning, embodying ideas of repression and desire enforced through control, manifested in tyranny or trauma or brutality, breaking through a skin of normality and permissible power.
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source: vitrinegallerycouk
Jamie Fitzpatrick’s practice deals with the rhetoric of image making, the relevance of the figure and how objects and totemic gestures such as flags, statues or plinths are used within the work to impose forms of power, authority and control. By employing the motifs of figurative art, patriarchal depictions of masculinity and nationhood, Fitzpatrick’s domineering sculptures express intention of undermining them, rendering them absurd and dumb.

BIOGRAPHY

Jamie Fitzpatrick (b.1985) lives and works in London. He graduated in 2015 with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, having gained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practice in 2009 from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. Solo exhibitions include; Into the Hands of Housewives & Children, Telfer Gallery, Glasgow (2012) and Jamie Fitzpatrick, Gallery of Wonder, Hancock Museum, Newcastle (2011) Group exhibitions include; UK/RAINE, Saatchi Gallery, London (2015), New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2015), Which one of these is the non-smoking lifeboat? and Taking Shape: Sculpture on the Verge, Pangaea Sculptor’s Centre, London (2015), Off The Wall, HQS Wellington, London (2015), Cowley Manor Sculpture Garden Show, Cheltenham, (2015), Pause Patina, Camden Arts Centre, London (2015), The Day Job, Hoxton Basement, London (2014), Of Natural and Mystical Things, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2012), A Grand Day Out, Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow (2012) and Now I Know my ABC’s, SWG3, Glasgow (2009).

Fitzpatrick has received various Funding, Awards and Residencies including; UK/RAINE Saatchi Gallery Sculpture Prize (December 2015); Cowley Manor Residency, Cheltenham (2015), Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre Residency, London (2015), LAND Securities Award (2015), Sidney Perry Foundation (2013 & 2015), Mijoda Trust (2014), The Leatherseller’s Company (2014), Telfer Gallery Residency, Glasgow (2012), John Kinross Scholarship, Florence, Italy (2010), Cite International des Arts, Paris Residency (2009), Scottish Sculpture Workshop (2009), Dundee Visual Artist Award Bursary (2009), Wasps Studio Prize, Dundee (2009) and George Duncan of Drumfork Scholarship (2008).