Joe Mackay

We live in an unprecedented new era of global capital. I am troubled as much as I am perplexed by an unrelenting sense of internal psychological crisis. My art practice to date has vigorously sought to examine the cause of this crisis and its implication for the self, underpinned by psychoanalytical theory surrounding psychosis by R.D Laing in his landmark text The Divided Self.

The restless pursuit of a source to account for the entropic forces at work on my own psyche has culminated in the discovery of a concatenation of events with roots inextricably linked to capitalist ideology. My work forms a series of in depth reflections examining the impact of the prevailing ideology on the self. This enquiry is explored through a hybrid of contemporary abstract painting and performance art, although I also traverse drawing and collage in conjunction with digital technologies to create my work.