"Demo Tape"

This painting inspired the title of the collection as I like to think of the work like songs or tracks on an album. I like that art and music can sometimes bypass our cognitive biases and get straight to the heart. I found this cassette tape while organising some things that had been packed away for years. I decided to paint it as I was drawn to its retro look and felt it made a fitting symbol of the era that I grew up in. I am part of the “Xennial” sub-generation born roughly between 1977 and 1985 and characterised by our analogue childhood and digital adulthood. The spirit of analogue is a foundational theme of my work. In hindsight, I felt that the lessons our boomer parents could teach us, were becoming less fit for purpose as the rate of change multiplied exponentially. So, we had to figure a lot out for ourselves.

Music as an art form had a huge impact on me, especially the counterculture and independent music of the time. It was nice to see some resistance against the mass media slop that was being fed to us. For me it was also a time of acute disillusionment, as one-by-one, every idea that I thought had any soul or meaning, was systematically co-opted into consumer products so people could just buy their culture and identity off the shelf with very little real effort or virtue.

The cassette tape was the most common way to buy music until it was taken over by the digital compact disc in the 90’s. It was also a time when I discovered the joys of listening to music on the move with the popularity of portable cassette players and boom boxes. Many of the old cassettes I found were mixtapes as I recall listening to the radio ready to press record when something came on that I liked. It was common to share mixtapes with friends or as love letters for a romantic interest.