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After a near death experience as a teenager Stuart Semple quit art school to become an artist. Although diverse in it’s presentation, his body of work orbits around a handful of recurring themes; anxiety, society, cultural history, technology, connection, community and freedom. Working across painting, sculpture, happenings and online, Semple’s works have been exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions, fairs and biennials and at institutions including The Barbican, ICA London, Goss Michael Foundation, Denver Art Museum and The Whitworth. He has created large-scale public projects for cities including Melbourne, Dublin, London, Moscow and Manchester and Denver.
Tell me the story behind one of your pieces? It’s hard to choose just one because I tend to work in series, but there’s one called the Angelus. It’s after Millet. I grew up in Catholic school and every day we’d pause and stand a pray, looking at a print of this painting. My great grandmother had it in her house (and a Virgin Mary in her knickers – but that’s another story). In those prints I started to develop my reverence for art, it felt important – like it could pause the world. When I was in my 20s I tackled remaking it and it inveitably ended up being a weird self portrait that mixed burning palm trees from an usher video and a motorbike crash from a puffy one.
What’s your general mood entering February? I’m feeling quite optimistic but I’m craving the summer now, the end of the cold is coming I’m seeing the daffodils about and the days are getting lighter.
What has been your most difficult learning to date, and why? The more I dig and the further I go the more I realise that I’ll never be good enough to make what’s in my heart. Even if I live hundreds of lifetimes I’ll never be great or get to the end of the ideas that come. I suppose if anything I’ve learned that I need to live with the pain of relentlessly failing to realize what I hoped to. There’s a gap between a concept and a viewer and in that gap something always gets lost and that’s really frustrating but it’s what we’ve got to play with.
Tell me a fun fact that not many people know about you… I’m colour blind.
What advice can you share with fellow creators? Get to know that part of you that compels you to make things, listen to and nurture that voice and make stuff from there only.
Final thoughts…YOU ARE LOVE
