Artist Statement

Mark Edward’s creative practice engages the fantastical mystical surrealist world of his imagination. This make-believe world is a faraway cosmic planet where creatures and supernatural realms are constructed. Fantastical stories evolve and are conveyed through the medium of gestural and figurative drawing, painting, video and sculptural work. Delving deep into the subconscious mind where the unspoken word informs the narrative.

The work contemplates imaginary, unspoken life experiences, figments of a fantastical world. Words and thoughts that through the manifestation of a surrealist and mystical magical world of the make-believe play intuitively into his practice. Mark explores how sculptural forms and gestural expressive drawing can coexist, act as hybrid for the creation of make-believe sensory experience

Mark’s practice switches from time to time from the fantastical world of his make-believe to the natural and the living animal world, a cause he is deeply engaged in through his awareness and choice not to eat animal products. Mark connects this vision of everyday life with the world in relation to climate change and the environment, particularly the ecocentric and Anthropocene.

In 2022 through this engagement, Mark has created a series of watercolour paintings that creates illusionary narratives highlighting his interest in these themes.

He works across a range of media including drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture and installation.

In 2019 and 2020, Mark created projects that incorporated the natural world with an emphasis on the manifestation of presenting a form of living environment. Major work included Shuttle of Remembrances 2019. This work was derived from ongoing visits to the Metro tunnel site at Domain Road, The Anzac Precinct, Melbourne, Australia. Mark observed the changing landscape of the built environment, due to the development and disruption to this particular site.

He utilised this heightened experience of the surrounding to create a personal habitat. Particular emphasis was conveyed through the use of recycled paper, spheres and birds that became a repository of memory. Mark was quoted “the work focused on constant flux and implied “narratives” within constructed and urban forms; investigating changing landscapes and ideas of place, the notion of the breathing of spaces as I work through the site, the memory, this plays an integral part in my work”.

My practice extracts elements that signify related juxtapositions within a felt sculptural form that is a habitat. The work is haptic, generative and organic in its nature. I work primarily conceptually without an end in sight, therefore, the relationship to life is integral and symbiotic; my work flows as time flows.