Artists > 2010: Framing Identity > Jamie Shovlin

Work

Jamie Shovlin’s Rough Cut/Cut Rough (Hiker Meat) uses Tatton’s Tower Wood as a site for more of the folly and imagination its original designers envisaged. The Tower, historically understood to have been constructed to allow for a clear viewing point of sheep (and dubbed ‘the Sheep Stealer’s Tower’) was, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, employed as an amusement for guests of the Mansion; encouraged, after a meal, to stroll the gardens and be ‘terrified’ by a mad hermit who lived in the Tower. Shovlin’s addition to the Gardens is a shed. Within, something wicked resides. It is unclear what, exactly, is taking place, but there is a feeling for all who visit of definite unease. Flickering light comes from within and sounds of distress can be heard around the structure. But, for those who choose to come close enough to rigorously examine, the abandoned shed looks all too recently left and suggests that the orchestrator of horror is not too far from home. Transforming these beautiful, easily grasped gardens into a site of fear is paramount to a work that invites visitors to ponder ‘the natural’ as a space for titillating terror.

Biography

Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. He is an artist whose work combines extraordinary facility as a draughtsman, printmaker, painter and writer with conceptual complexity and playfulness.

His painstakingly researched and executed works merge inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive. Through his projects Shovlin questions how information becomes authoritative and explores the way that we map and classify the world in order to understand it.