Mark Metcalfe's practice features characters that challenge fixed ideas about trust, faith and the unknown, becoming totemic of a deep drive to externalise hidden things through characterisation. Mark's work reflects a preoccupation with memory and nostalgia, where an image can posit a peculiar melancholy or sense of the uncanny, through a memorialization of the past, constructed through archetypal heroes, tricksters and bizarre phenomena.

The Ectoplasm Structure series applies this approach…

Mark Metcalfe's practice features characters that challenge fixed ideas about trust, faith and the unknown, becoming totemic of a deep drive to externalise hidden things through characterisation. Mark's work reflects a preoccupation with memory and nostalgia, where an image can posit a peculiar melancholy or sense of the uncanny, through a memorialization of the past, constructed through archetypal heroes, tricksters and bizarre phenomena.<br/> <br/> The Ectoplasm Structure series applies this approach to alleged emanations of ectoplasm. Structure 2 shows an alleged emanation of Ectoplasm during a seance just after the war. Some say the substance is nothing more than cheese cloth and it is such performative aspects of showmanship with a touch of the charlatan that speak to the artist's favoured treatment.

Much of my work operates something akin to a reconstruction or rather a reinterpretation of an existing narrative that already sits in the collective memory, drawn from somewhere in time and yet existing outside temporal space. Moreover, by working through archetypal and allegorical forms, characte…

Much of my work operates something akin to a reconstruction or rather a reinterpretation of an existing narrative that already sits in the collective memory, drawn from somewhere in time and yet existing outside temporal space. Moreover, by working through archetypal and allegorical forms, characters emerge that challenge fixed ideas about trust, faith and the unknown. I work on solo projects and collaboratively with artist Emma Somerset Davis in our Bermondsey studio. I have a cross practice approach, with painting taking salience most recently.