Joe Foot

Joe Foot is a mixed media artist living and working in Caernarfon. His work is vibrant, playful and rich with internal relationships, combining digital photography with analogue media such as painting and collage. Joe has a general interest in representation and communication. After studying art foundation diploma in Northampton in 2003, he moved from his hometown of Kettering to Bangor in 2006 to study Linguistics. Despite a fascination with the patterns of language, he found the standardised format of academic discourse creatively dissatisfying.

After graduating, Joe experimented with geometric pen drawings, abstract paintings and sculpture. He was then commissioned to do two murals in Upper Bangor (2012). These were both optical illusions: one a perspective illusion of colourful cascading cubes and the other a zip ‘revealing brickwork’ on the front of a building (sadly no longer visible). These all contributed towards his eclectic style.

Getting a smartphone in 2013 allowed Joe to casually experiment with photography. Inspired in part by the ‘cut and paste’ avant-garde sound sampling of musique concrète, he ‘sampled’ patterns which caught his eye, often whilst walking in the beautiful North Wales countryside.

Using his smartphone he layered these photos over one another, transfixed by the ethereal quality of multiple exposures (aka ‘Photoblends’). This also honed his eye for composition; easy manipulation meant Joe was able to play around with different arrangements and get a better sense of what ‘works’ compositionally. Also, the small screen view gave a better sense of schematic structure at a glance. This creative run resulted in displays in Bangor Deiniol Centre (2017) and his hometown of Kettering (at the memorably titled ‘Kettfest’ - 2016, 2018, 2019).

Studying joinery (2017-2019) gave him a taste for hand crafting objects, which led him back to analogue creations, most notably photocollage, stencils and painting. The collages were constructed largely from left over photoblends, along with regular photos and some photos of his old work. The themes of recycling material - finished pieces becoming elements in new works and the freedom of sampling process help to feed a generative artistic ecosystem which highlights and caricatures the intertextuality of all representation. Subsequent works feature stencils and various painting techniques. Bold colours, dark lines and high contrast feature heavily.

Joe’s creative choices are often guided as much by novel perspectives and methodological quirks as they are by gut feeling. His work is an exploration of the tropes of representation. The idea of one thing standing in the place of, or pointing to another, evoking themes from his linguistic studies; concepts of association and syntax, metaphor and metonymy inform his work deeply. What is the relation between form and substance? What is the uniting power of the context/frame? Can anything be made to represent anything? Under what conditions? In which ways can proximity imply relationship? And so on. The aim is to create original works which, hopefully, intrigue and engage the viewer too.

Joe sees art as ‘playing with patterns’. In this way, it is a therapeutic relationship with his imagination, a way of exploring and communicating the mundane mystery of being a person in the world and a final statement that it is ‘strange to be anything at all’.