BEGINNINGS

This project is to be an experiment in the potential of a self-portrait in contemporary art. 

Whilst most of the artwork that I create is connected to my passions by default, there are some things that I love that have not been present in my practice to this point. The part of my life that I will be exposing in this project will come as no surprise to those people who know me closely.

I am a complete bike nerd.  I always have been and always will be.  Bikes have always been my form of escape, a very real expression of freedom.  As a child I rode BMX bikes, making motorbike noises and fantasizing about being a race winning superhero.  As a teenager I developed a passion for mountain biking, spending hours pedaling through the Adelaide Hills, still dreaming of being a race winning superhero.  As an adult I commute daily by bicycle, ride my mountain bike most weekends and have finally succumbed to humility, realizing that I am not the world champion athlete of my dreams.

The most recent development in my cycling life has been my introduction to the freak bike world.  I have a very distinct memory from more than a decade ago of witnessing a horde of outrageous looking people riding strangely modified bikes, I thought that this one of the most amazing sights that I have ever witnessed.  Over time I have come to know this group as local freak bikers, the Tongue of Fire.  In the last couple of years I’ve finally met some of these people and begun to build weird bikes of my own.  This has become a combination of my creative and cycling passions but also extends my socio political concerns, as these bikes tend to become very real public challenges to the norm. I have resisted bringing freak bikes into my art world because, most often, they engage best in their natural state – being ridden publicly.  This project will become a framework for me to explore potential cross over between my outdoor and gallery pursuits. 

As such, this will revolve around the construction of a bike and the adventures of that machine.  This particular bicycle will become a site and a vehicle with which I can test my own ideas and engage with viewers in both the physical and virtual world.  It will become a kind of research tool to explore, social, political, cultural and physical ideas. The online component of this adventure will work as all blogs do, offering links and jumping points to relevant and aligned outcomes as filled out by personal musings and highjacked content.