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 currently studying for a BA in Fine Art— Painting & Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art.

Michael Dudgeon endorses the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Artist Statement

My work explores the political and personal implications of governmental interventions in our lives. I am concerned with ideas of agency and information within democracy and that my values are not being represented by those elected to do so. I view drawing as a core tool in a political dismantling and unveiling of 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 an extension of my drawing practice, which offers a unique range of markmaking techniques 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 forced up to the front, what is knocked back, 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. Often drawing from film, I am called towards questioning the nature of looking and bearing witness through quoting the language of cinema, the “machine that generates empathy”, the camera-as-weapon, and constructing compositions with both material and imagined collaborators, bringing the in-picture themes to critique the consistent mediation of a barbaric government in our daily lives.