Adam Collier (b. 1986)

Adam Collier (b.1986, Bangor, Wales) previously studied at University of the West of England. The objects and images that comprise Adam Collier’s output belie a fascination with the contingent nature of narrative and an interest in how an object’s social agency is offset by its essential materiality. Variously absurd anthropomorphised forms of mysterious provenance, character or utility, huddle together in an only half suggested shared realm; inviting speculation as to their relation to the world and to one another.

Influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of the carnivalesque objects are shaped by a pattern of play and sometimes marked by a display of excess or grotesqueness. Things are rendered ever changing playful and under-defined. Hierarchies are overturned through inversions, debasements and profanations, and humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom in such a way as to subvert it.