Richard Dunlop

Question  Your work is concerned with the vast and inflected forms of nature, serving as a metaphor for lived experience. The collection of objects in your paintings serves as conceptual messages about taxonomic relationships, arbitrary matrixes over an unruly nature, and the transience of the certainties of science. I have noticed the bug appear as subject matter and as discrete additions in some of your paintings, can you tell us about the bug in your work?

Response  Bugs (particularly ‘rhino’ beetles) are a recurring image for me, great forms to hang paint on and intersect with themes of taxonomy, museology, and stable (tattooed)/shifting identities and histories.

These paintings represent traces of unreliable memories, circumstantial evidence and documentation of people, objects and events, things I once knew and believed, things I once witnessed, collected, embraced, felt, deserved, failed, planned, ended, wanted and championed - not usually in that order. When I was a child, ‘rhino’ beetles and blue butterflies seemed plentiful.

Now one of the enduring certainties of the world seems to be the vitality of painting. Fortunately, the puritans and wowsers who spent years pronouncing the death of painting are now ducking for cover or will soon be dead themselves.