ARTHUR BOOTHBY

Arthur Boothby (b.1999) recently finished his postgrad at the Royal Drawing School. Working from a broad range of interests, from archaeology to neuroscience to philosophy, he has developed a practice consisting of drawing, painting and writing. He delves, through reflection and reflections, into the inner and outer self and attempts, through diagrammatics, wordplay and pictures, to convey the bodily and mental strangeness of being, and of being in the world.

Statement:

Hoarfrost white night saw shards shatter.

A cold hand severed lay. The razor-film,

The qualitative bubble burst and what was, wasn’t.

No cold no white no hand. The pieces fell scattered.

Teeth, brains, bones were.

Hewn of one form, forming no whole,

Simply were.

And what was, was left unnamed, unmeaning,

Was meaning’s absence. The uninominal noumenon,

Gleaned only in hints. In shades and glimmers,

No dots connecting. My work tries at that bodily disjunct,

A-part-of and yet apart from.

My work is about my feeling of bodily unease at both creating the world, through my own phenomenological experience, and yet simultaneously being a product of that world, able only to observe it as ‘through a glass, darkly.’ I draw on nightmares of posthuman futures, emergent intelligences and positive cybernetic feedback loops. On the fear of being and on the fear of not being.