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Biography
Jonathan Alibone is an artist based in Northampton, UK, and is currently a resident at The Sanctuary studios. He has exhibited widely and his work features in collections throughout Europe, Russia and USA. Alibone has collaborated on numerous projects, and worked in a variety of mediums, such as video, installation, and sound. However, in 2014 he rediscovered his passion and fascination for oil paint, and ever since has worked exclusively in the medium, striving to innovate and develop a technique to effectively, and economically, give form to his ideas.

In Alibone’s paintings, the viewer is invited to explore a world that is recognisable, yet also strange and unknowable. It is a place that is indefinable, a ‘neither here nor there’ terra incognita at the furthest edge of memory and time. A world that is glimpsed emerging from, or returning to the shadows, evoking an unsettling and traumatised territory, a liminal zone which can be understood as both a physical and a psychological landscape; a contested frontier that lies between the safe and familiar, and something desolate, threatening and uncanny.

Recent work represents something of a departure from the artist’s normal practice, and is the result of a growing dissatisfaction with using found images for inspiration. Towards the end of 2016 Alibone began to sculpt landscapes in concrete, and assemble dioramas of crude structures, torn fragments and shattered ruins of cardboard and assorted detritus. Each scene was lit by a single low positioned lamp, before being photographed; the photos would then be the source for a new series of paintings. From the resulting images and paintings, a recurring theme began to emerge and unify the works: a vision of a precarious world lapsing into oblivion, haunted by petrified remains and by the vanished narratives of a vanishing land.

The artist writes: ‘I intend my art to not so much reveal and illuminate, but to deepen mysteries, to declare the strange, even terrifying, in the familiar and banal around us. In short, to enact a strategy to transform base materials, and en-chant the humble and the overlooked.’