Jack Lavender’s practice shifts between painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage. What unites all these strands is his infatuation with juxtaposition. Lavender obsessively collects random found objects such as plastic toys, kitchen equipment or basketball hoops which he finds himself drawn to, he incessantly photographs the British coastline. He also gathers printed materials from magazines, newspaper clippings, old books and flyers—with a particular focus on the 90s and 00s new age raver subcultures. This heady mix of materials is then intuitively and organically assembled together in either two-dimensional pieces or crossing over into three dimensions in the sculptural realm. Within this instinctive process of collaging, different motifs, patterns and images surface as narratives for each piece are built in tandem. Each positioning signals something to audiences, with the contrasts in each work telling different stories. Bizarre and playful in tone, Lavender’s work undeniably sits in conversation with Dada, Duchamp and Conceptual Art. However, his interest in the writing of Mark Fischer, current planetary conditions and rave culture distance his practice from these formal art historical references. In his own words, each piece is about “understanding where you’ve come from, where you’re going and seeing those two things as a whole”, with each piece hosting fragments from different historical moments, contexts, and geographies, an immense temporal and spatial elasticity is allocated to the works. ...
