About
Craig Sinclair is an award-winning artist, film-maker, writer and performer based in the North West of England.
His work explores the themes of nostalgia, queer bodies and grief through often darkly humorous subversions of childhood iconography, using a range of media (such as oil pastel, collage, sculpture, watercolours and animation) to realise images which ask difficult questions of our collective relationship with the past.
His recent works address the current trend of nostalgia in our pop culture, chiefly the recycling of childhood imagery; how it serves as a bittersweet reminder of our finite nature; how it can slow down the advancement of new ideas in pop culture and how over-indulgence can lead to a form of societal inertia.
He addresses these themes in part through the repurposing and subversion of popular childhood imagery from his own youth, rendering dark and uncanny versions of said images in unexpected media, creating a sense of upset in the viewer: the recognition of familiar images in contrast with their new, warped appearances.
In recent times, pop culture and digital algorithms show us that which we already recognise, trapping us in an endless loop of the familiar. Through injecting a sense of the uncanny; of the horror that comes when the familiar is rendered disturbing or slightly unrecognisable, he hopes to confront viewers with a poetic truth: that we are not safe living in the past, that the present is drifting away from us, and the future is long overdue.