Mike Ballard

As an artist living in London, surrounded by the wave of gentrification flooding the city, Ballard is a spectator of the everyday urban environment in its constant flux. Using the cityscape as his primary source for material, Ballard conveys the weight of visual noise displayed in the urban matter, immortalizing the fabric of a city, giving new life to the often ignored.

Hoardings are the basis of his sculptural work. They function as protection for non-places stuck in a state of inbetweeness whilst bearing witness to the world going by. His fascination lies with ownership, displacement, the transitional and the division amongst the city. Ballard’s sculptural work bestows the energy of the aged, worn, weathered, lived from an unpainterly aesthetic rooted in the “found” edging toward the “ready made”. This aesthetic is chosen by Ballard for its utilitarian abstraction, fusing weathering, graffiti application and removal. Taken as sheet material and then given form by the reconfiguration and collage of different environments transforming from being a threshold, keeping people out and forming a dividing line between public and private property.

Ballard, is also a vice in his own ideology as he often reworks his sculptures injecting new dialogues into them, deconstructing and making new. This is the case with Adapt to the Collapse, which includes new elements but mostly was reworked from Ballard’s monumental sculpture Laying in the Cut presented at KARST projects in Plymouth earlier this year.

In Ballard’s painting he recreates a layered nostalgia from the “found” image which Ballard has taken himself. Signage holds an indispensable position within Ballard’s painting practice. Ballard’s interest lies in the abstract forms of the layering and aging process of urban surfaces. Seeking out these forms and compositions of urban matter taken from his local environment Ballard uses gestural abstraction layered over these abstract remains, while preserving the appropriated. He superimposes the “found” imagery from his photographic transfers onto canvas using industrial mediums alongside more traditional tools, such as spray paint and oil and acrylic paint.

William Gustafsson Union Gallery 2018