For this month's Artwork we turned multi-medium artist Tom Hackett who's work is being exhibited at the upcoming New Art Exchange Open Exhibition from Friday 30 May...
This is a still image from my video Passage. The video is a sequence of short clips of nature, landscape, New York and of human life, each interspersed with a recurrent close up monochrome image of a young girl’s face. These were gathered over several months through a visual foraging process. I wanted a monochrome face to be looking straight into the viewers eyes as if questioning them. The clip arrangement is done intuitively in terms of what makes visual sense. On one level the piece is simply about actively looking beyond our filtered realities.
For the audio I am reciting my family’s weekly shop receipt from Carlton’s Tesco set to a digital backing track, which I put together. This is anthemic and melodramatic in its feel, and aims to raise the status of our everyday consumption as something we all need to think about. I try to do this in a playful, non-preachy way. It's also a celebration of nature, existence and place as ‘life affirming’. I try to keep my videos to roughly the length of a short pop song. I like the idea of art being experiential, rather than passive - even something that loops in your head like a song.
It's like a gentle nudge to a simple truth, that we and nature are very much part of the same eco-system
Increasingly the spoken word comes first, then the sound assemblage and finally I layer in the imagery, to weave a semantic tapestry. The use of sound is relatively fresh to me. And it’s a real gift as it jumps straight into our emotional brain.
Partly I hope to spark reflection on the paradox of our consumer disconnect with the natural world that is both our home and food larder. I also just want to explore and probe our world. It’s like a gentle nudge to a simple truth - that we and nature are very much part of the same ecosystem.
I was born in Cambridge and studied art at Middlesex in London in 1981. I then moved up to Sheffield, set up a studio space with some mates and I’ve been making art ever since. I had a commission with the Bonington Gallery in 1990 - we took a bit of a shine to Nottingham and its vibe, moving here in 1991. It’s provided a great creative base to push my work out into the world and is very much my adopted hometown.
In terms of other artists, I’ve always been drawn to art that interrupts and monkeys around with the everyday world; by association questioning the order of things around us.
You can see Tom's video 'Passage' as part of the NAE Open 2025 between 31 May-13 Sept 2025.
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