Damian Fennell

I want to expand my world.

I see the practice of fine art as inseparable from my core values as a human being and the ongoing pursuit of meaning in this life.

Essentially I am an idealist, and my primary motivation is to realise within tangible experience the truth about my existence.  In my work there seem to be two manifestations of this, akin to inhaling and exhaling.  The quality of internal stillness constantly recurs, but so too does the questioning of external human values and fundamental relationships.  Currently I am using the design and making processes of sculpture and drawing, in combination with writing, to examine and understand more about female power.  I am conscious of doing this in a sense from the outside – as a man – and I am also motivated by a sense of injustice that women still do not experience real equality of status and value in our social system.

I place conditions on my artistic practice and the resulting artwork.  It must be from personal experience and it must be honest.  Consequently it stumbles around in diaphonous regions between idealism and honesty, falling sometimes one way and sometimes the other – and it is an open question in my mind whether there must always be a distinction between the two.

25 January 2006