BEN EDMUNDS

Edmunds’ practice is deeply rooted in his background as a sailor and windsurfer with his work focusing on the crossover between these adventure sports, luxury lifestyle pursuits and colour field painting. Positioned between romanticism and scepticism, he questions the possibilities of abstraction as a transcendental experience, likening it to climbing a mountain or sailing in open water, and the role of paintings as philosophical equipment.

The paintings are created with layers of fabric dye, sprayed directly onto washed canvas. The deep colour spaces created often evoke seascapes or the sky, but also allude to the colour field paintings of mid-Century American abstraction. This sets up a conversation between pure abstraction and the stylised accents of sports, marketing, technology and leisure that frame the work.

Completed in January 2021, the ‘Almost Somewhere’ series of small works are his smallest pieces to date. Much like drawings, the shift in scale allowed Edmunds to move quickly through ideas and experiment with new ways of attaching the canvas to the frame. Taking inspiration from sail rigging and boat awnings, a common interest for the artist, he constantly seeks to update and explore traditional structural methods in painting. He refers to his works as ‘sculptures that look like paintings’.

Most recently, Edmunds has been examining the relationship between artist and brand–a phenomena hugely exaggerated with the rise of social media platforms. Often imagining his work as paintings made by a sports brand, Edmunds has created a sports brand made imagined by a painter. He has collaborated with with graphic designer Max Parsons and other companies including Adidas to develop his brand, Aspirational Equipment.

‘Aspirational Equipment is a sports and lifestyle brand for romantics, whose activities span the design and execution of individual objects, editions and collaborative projects. It provides tools for explorers and dreamers. It recognises the act of searching as a fundamental human driving force, and the state of being on the way somewhere as a part of the human condition’.