Mark Rathmell is a multidisciplinary artist and musician working out of his house in Hackney London, where he is a core member of the Tunnel artists collective.
He is also a member of Dismembered Sound Booth, a music collective which have released several albums and EP’s exploring a similar range of themes to Mark’s solo work – contemporary, abrasive, and often strangely beautiful.
Rathmell describes his first interest in art as being sparked by a boy who lived next door to him in his hometown of Bradford who was talented at drawing cartoons, his mum being an amateur artist. They had a drawing competition where Mark’s Mother was the judge and she said that his young friend was the winner. Mark was so upset he hit her on the head with a biro pen, and from then on he carried on drawing, eventually studying at Camberwell College of Arts.
Years later after his friend had moved away he found out his friend had studied literature at university, yet Mark carried on drawing, wanting at first to be a cartoonist like Disney or Charles Schultz, but at around the age of 12 Mark was first exposed to modern art and became obsessed with it. Describing it as a world that he could escape into, a world that was an escape from the different and often quite abusive environment of his school, village, and hometown.
Rathmell’s influences include:
Marlene Dumas, John Cage, Rauschenberg, Bacon, Hockney, Dubuffet, Ai Weiwei, Basquiat
De Kooning, David Lynch, Brian Eno, David Shirley, Meredith Monk – all for different reasons in different ways
The themes in Rathmell’s work include an exploration of Toxic Masculinity, which he describes as having an impact on him during his time in Bradford leaving him with anger issues and PTSD and which he works through using meditation. Other recurring themes include life, death, sex, violence, human nature as well as climate breakdown, and our own potential extinction. Human representation is also a recurring theme in abstracted figurative works, inspired equally by cubism as they are x-rays, as he searches for new forms of representation. As Rathmell modestly puts it
“I’m trying to capture and filter and process and represent in new and changing ways my thoughts/experiences of life & the universe through non-literal means. I’ve never come
close to doing this yet.”
His approach to materials is experimental and broad, as he uses drawing, digital tools and paint, and even film to create his works. His distinctive digital work is often created using an iPad Pro. Chance and accident are an important factor in the creation of his work, as well as timed daily work, daily mark making exercises.
Rathmell’s work philosophically is work that is comfortable exploring that void that lies underneath human consciousness and experience and informed by Rathemellls exploration of existentialism and Buddhist philosophy, describing it thus –
There’s a half-baked hotchpotch of Sartre and Zen Buddhism fulminating somewhere in my mind. It winds its way into the attitude I feel when I’m making art, which probably makes
my mark making a bit looser and sometimes arbitrary or even aggressive, perhaps. When you’re comfortable with the notion of the void, you become less precious about your brushstrokes
Rathmell’s work has been featured in several groups and solo exhibitions in London including a solo show at The Foundry, an important formative venue that gave him his first solo show, a group show curated by Danny Pockets and Vanya Balogh in Fulham as well as numerous shows curated by the Tunnel art collective and Brixton Cool Tan event.
On the Tunnel:
I’ve been in lots of tunnel shows, and I probably love most tunnel members more than my parents.
On the Brixton Cool Tan event:
These venues are better than galleries or live venues, they’re also community centres by and for the local community. Brixton Cool Tan was a big squatted unemployment benefit office on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton. I did performances there as part of exhibition openings once or twice. I’d like to squat a big commercial premises and turn it into a community arts centre. There are one or two similar places in Hackney Wick.
Currently, Rathmell is working on a commission continuing a series he has been doing recently called Cloud portraits – where he uses a photograph of a cloud and transforms it into a portrait, the cloud being both the canvas and materials and a new DSB track composed by talking samples of his friend Micheal’s voice coughing and whining while he’s going cold turkey – to be called Michael Going Cold Turkey
Rathmell describes DSB as:
by far the nicest people I have ever made music with. We just finished making an album of songs called Music For Addicts which is on Bandcamp and YouTube. It’s our third album. We’ve got a lot of videos on YouTube. The lyrics of songs and the titles / subject matter of the songs spill over into the artwork and vice versa. The themes are the same.
Rathmell’s art is a testament to developing a routine as an artist, developing your ideas, and always continually experimenting and evolving your work.
As this anecdote illustrates, the time is always now to make and create –
“I had a friend called Warren, quite a glamorous guy who had his own business as an interior designer. He was always telling me to “get off your jacksie” and start a career as an artist, and I’d always think okay I’d love to – please tell me how to do it. Then he suddenly died at 50 of a heart attack, which was a shock because he looked so fit and young compared to me. That jolted me. I’ve always believed in never giving in and that one day, when I had the time and freedom, I’d really throw myself into my art, but his death made me realise more than ever before that you can’t wait around for the ideal circumstances and that sometimes you don’t lose – you just run out of time.“
Find out more:
Instagram: mark.rathmell
Dismembered Sound Booth: http://wearedsb.com/
