Andrew Ekins

Butter Mountain

Andrew Ekin’s Butter Mountain is part of an ongoing series of works that combines a sense of painterly mass and substance with sculptural language to examine the synergy between a topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition. The work intentionally alludes to the materiality of the human body and of the land. A stool has been consciously repurposed as a “support”, that by its nature and identity provides evidence of human presence. Paint skins are harvested from tins of domestic and industrial or art paints. These are piled, stacked, and manipulated to shape a crumpled fleshy landscape, mirroring the grime of human presence and the materiality of a body of land. The title of this work refers to the name given to an extraordinary bulk of “food-waste” created by a period of blinkered EEC political management of food production, which led to the infamous confrontation between Bob Geldof and Margret Thatcher drawing attention to the issue. These works are formed over time and bear the marks of time in their appearance. The sagging, misshapen form is intended to carry some of the narrative of the work. Themes of mortality and decay, growth, and renewal are asserted and cloaked by a corrupted decorative structure surfacing through the substance of the paint. Ekins is interested in developing a confection of degraded beauty, a fugitive relationship between the sublime, the abject, and a contemporary perception of beauty.