TOM HUNTER

Biography: Tom Hunters work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Hunter has earned several awards during his career and has an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts from the University of East London for his work documenting the lives of the people of East London. He is a Professor of Photography Research at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.Hunter graduated from the London College of Printing in 1994 with his work The Ghetto, which is now on permanent display at the Museum of London. He studied for his MA at the Royal College of Art, where, he was awarded the Photography Prize by Fuji Film for his series Travellers. In 1999 Hunters series of the Holly Street estate was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2000 Toms Life and Death in Hackney series, went on show at the White Cube Gallery, then on to Manchester City Art Gallery. His works are in many collections around the world including; MOMA, New York, The V&A, London, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Smithsonian, Washington and the Los Angles County Museum of Art. Even though his photographs not intended to be photographic reconstructions of the classical paintings, you can see that Toms work draws heavily from these old masterpieces. Hunters work focuses on his local environment of Hackney. His influence was Vermeer. In Hunters view this artist created a template for artists wanting to show the dignity of ordinary people involved in their daily lives, elevating the ordinary into the extraordinary. For Hunter this idea has influenced him greatly.

Form: The

reworking of John Millaiss Ophelia shows a young girl whose journey home from one rave was shortened by falling into the canal and losing herself to the dark slippery, industrial motorway of a past era. The girl is not completely submerged in the water but floating with her face on the surface of the water, which mirrors the classical painting of Ophelia almost identically. The setting highlights the scruffy urban area thats the nearest open space Hackney residents have, where you can find bushes, grass, and trees. Process: Life and Death in Hackney paints a landscape, which creates a melancholic beauty out of the post-industrial decay where the sub-cultural inhabitants took root and bloomed. Hunter took some of the attributes associated with the Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as social engagement, which has been largely erased from the cultural understanding of this group and through the combination of beauty and nature Hunter reinvestigated his maligned inner city landscape and society to create an unusual chronicle of contemporary, urban Britain. Content: This maligned and abandoned area became the center of the new warehouse rave scene of the early 90s. During this time the old print factories, warehouses and workshops became the playground of a new generation, taking the DIY culture from the free festival scene and adapting it to the urban wastelands. This Venice of the East End, with its canals, rivers and waterways, made a maze of pleasure gardens and structures where thousands of explorers travelled to be induced with music and drugs. Women have always been associated with the earth, their bodies being a source of nourishment and reproduction. Ophelia drowning in the pool is a return to earth or in this case water. His work got a negative critique by the Sunday Times, objecting to what he called the cut and paste aesthetic you can also see in other areas of cultural life, referring to it as a dumbing down of culture. Hunter has inspired me to take biblical stories showing fire in a positive light and reproducing them in a modern way, but at the same time mirroring the main messages. I have chosen to do this with five bible passages; Moses and the Burning Bush, The Baptism of Jesus, The Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, The alter of incense, and The four men in the furnace.