ArcadeCampfa, Cardiff | Photo: Michal Iwanowski | This solo show explored the aesthetics of power in visual forms of national identity, playing with ideas for a cross-national rebranding exercise for nuclear super powers. Drawings and objects explode the geometric and decorative components of national seals and emblems, such as wings, claws, horns, beaks and crops. The wing form features heavily – a symbol with multiple readings – flight, strength, weakness, escape. Featuring carbon paper drawings, Excel spreadsheet drawings and large-scale paper weaving.
The title of this piece refers to the Stealth Bomber: the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. The theme of military annihilation is expanded beyond national branding here, to incorporate a shape returned to regularly – a component of a stealth bomber wing from a model-making kit. This forms the mirrored wing shapes at the top of the weaving. The ongoing fascination with this stealth technology combines a sense of awe and horror at its potential, as evidence of the complexity of human engineering, and its purpose – to strategically destroy ‘the other’. Photo: Michal Iwanowski
Photo: Michal Iwanowski
Photo credit: Michal Iwanowski
ArcadeCampfa, Cardiff | Photo: Michal Iwanowski | The recurrent interest in the functional, physical and gestural experience of work features in the making of this drawing, created on an Excel spreadsheet, the tool of the parti-time arts administrator. Excel serves as a colouring book, the formatting palette providing decorative choices, the software’s functionality disregarded for the creation of a scheme of ornate abstracted wing shapes and heraldic forms, tumbling down a scroll.
Photo: Michal Iwanowski
Photo: Michal Iwanowski
The royal coat of arms of the UK depicts the lion and the chained unicorn as supporters, surrounded by the excessive flurries of the full heraldic achievement. The horn and the chain here are isolated from their context, becoming sculptural drawings of a fragmented heraldry that feels remote from the experiences of citizens. Photo: Michal Iwanowski
Photo: Michal Iwanowski
Photo credit: Michal Iwanowski
The dinosaur death pose is characterised by a hyperextended neck, thrown back and fractured – opisthotonus. There are several theories about why this happened in the moment of death; one last moment fossilised over and again, a violent depiction of the finality of death, and the visual drama of species extinction. Photo: Michal Iwanowski
The nine images in this series form a composite drawing. Referencing the number of nation-states with or believed to have nuclear weapons (UK, USA, France, China, North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, Russia), imagery from each national emblem is pulled apart, fragmented into a set of flat signs retaining form with meaning sidelined. Layering and recombining familiar, often shared symbols by tracing and overlaying on delicate carbon paper - the staple of stationery shops and receipt books. The dinosaur death pose is an additional motif, skeletal components surfacing through the flimsy paper, explicitly referencing the catastrophe of extinction. Photo: Michal Iwanowski
The faces of the heads of state or individuals with responsibility for nuclear detonation of the nine nuclear states, merged on a phone app, and drawn on carbon paper. Photo: Michal Iwanowski
Photo: Michal Iwanowski
