OVERVIEW

3 months residency at the YARAT Studios

ARTIST STATEMENT:
Luke Burton’s practice works across different media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and video and focuses on the relevance of the decorative in contemporary art and society. 
Additionally, his recent series of paintings and drawings explore how personal and collective forms of ambivalence are found in attitudes towards aesthetics, urban development and gender. Currently, he is interested in a broad matrix of topics and questions: what constitutes an expressive gesture; fountains as a symbol of public decorations and declarations of power; the English idiom, ‘to have your cake and eat it too’; and how the notion of ‘heritage’ offers the artist unending gifts as well as fundamental burdens. 
In Burton’s recent videos he uses the architecture of urban landscape as a stage to perform estranged or intimate interactions with architectural ornament. He performs a series of repeated actions or gestures to explore Romantic artist positions, humour, and play as a form of dissidence. These actions are elicited rather than predetermined, through paying attention to particular sites and their details, formal qualities and contexts.