Michael Dudgeon is an artist from Glasgow, Scotland. He works across drawing and printmaking, combining processes and experimenting with techniques to explore facets of our relationship to media, politics, and the notion of the hand in artistic practice. He is a recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art.

Artist Statement

My work explores the visual language of image-making through investigating my deep relationship to drawing and film. I am concerned with the enigmatic quality of the projected image; the moth-like attraction to the light, and how the light can illuminate, selectively, what one is directed to see. I view drawing as a core tool in dismantling and unveiling what is hidden from view; how the act of obfuscating the truth can itself be manipulated by the material processes my images are put through. Similarly, I see printmaking as another arm of my drawing practice, which offers a unique depth of process and endemic pictorial qualities to explore the idea of what is wrought within the work. My process is a constant labour of push-and-pull from the picture plane— what is softly burnished into the foreground, what is darkened into obscurity, and what interrupts the balance. In the end, the drawings become the act of mediation—a screen placed between the viewer and the subject that eventually dissolves into the picture. I question the nature of looking and bearing witness, quoting the language of cinema, the “machine that generates empathy”, the camera-as-weapon, and constructing compositions with both material and imagined collaborators.