Gary Powell

Gary Powell has worked as a designer and illustrator since graduating from St Martins School of Art & Design in 1985. Originally studied a degree in Graphic Design, before Post-Graduate studies at St Martins where he achieved a distinction. Powell has established a significant national and international reputation working on numerous projects that span across editorial, design, advertising & multimedia. He teaches at the University of Brighton.

Abstract:
Burnt offerings (History reveals me as a ‘Hybrid’)

There is recent debate that illustration has become more of a ‘Hybrid’ practice driven by technological, economical and social/cultural change and the traversing of diverse media platforms. As an illustrator/designer/printmaker my personal and professional practice often involves crossbreeding processes, fusing ideas and techniques producing Hybrid images and processes as ‘visual reasoning’ reinterpretation of received knowledge.

Amalgamating areas of interests and curiosities on both content and aesthetics. Illustration utilised as a ‘commentary’ on social change, considering wider ideas of the interchange and tensions between transcultural identity, location and
context e.g. Issues of migration; post-colonial reflections on personal/collective history.

However, history also reveals me as a ‘Hybrid’ or walking ‘Palimpsest’. The result of superimposition of an older society or culture by a newer one or vice versa. My ‘black’ image, juxtaposed/amalgamated with roots that extend back beyond post
Colonialism to the West Indies and also traces back to India.

When I reflect on being shown some of my family ancestry photographs. I puzzled at a Great-Grandfather who was a white Scotsman, strands of our family who I knew were more Indian and another branch who were more Chinese. A multi-cultural hybrid family, a by-product of a time when, humans were considered commodity.

Things may have changed. We are in a world of change. We have always been in a world of change, a state of flux. However, if change is constant, in theory nothing has changed. Are we not always caught between the past and the future? Today two Memorials exist in Brighton (England) to commemorate the Indian soldiers that passed through the Brighton hospitals during the First World War 1914 - 1918. The First is the gateway to the Pavilion grounds from the South.

The second is the Chattri, located on the South Downs near Patcham erected after the war, built on the exact spot where the bodies of Indian soldiers had been cremated. The Chattri bears the following inscription, in Urdu, Hindi and English:
“To the memory of all Indian soldiers who gave their lives for their King-Emperor in the Great War, this monument, erected on the site of the funeral pyre where the Hindus and Sikhs who died in hospital at Brighton passed through the fire, is
in grateful admiration and brotherly affection dedicated”.

It is my intention to investigate these burnt offerings (sacrifices) sometimes forgotten, history rewritten or unrecorded on a personal and collective.