Chris Bond

Artist statement:

In 2019, just prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, I rekindled my interest in the notion of individual autonomy as a reaction to the widespread public protests that had begun to dominate public discourse. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the right to protest, or with the ideas expressed, but because of a sense of danger I felt in mass ideology.

As a source of comfort, I’d search through protest photographs for distracted, disengaged or uncomfortable individuals that I felt some kind of commune with. Rote was one of my finds in a crowd, a pixelated fragment, and in the absence of knowing anything about her, I gave her a name, painted her, and imagined an interaction with her in Huddersfield on a black and white trimmed narrowboat, The Whisper.