Derrick Guild RSA

b 1963 Perth, Scotland

Derrick is a multi-discipline artist and curator. He is interested in several different approaches, paintings, objects and installations reconfiguration of historical painting, and natural history. Dealing with many ideas, that include identity, gender, societal structures, anthropomorphism, realism, trompe-loile, authorship, personal poetry and the uncanny.

“I’m attracted to artworks and approaches to making art from the past. Still-Life, portraiture, botanical painting and natural history mix with influences that include contemporary literature, the history of philosophy, contemporary art and film. Art and processes from the past are not a closed system. I seek a fluidity and connection between the past and present, creating new and relevant meanings”.

Jekyll Plant

The title seeks to connect Robert Louis Stevensons "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and the great Gertrude Jekyll. 

I love historical botanical painting, but also find its scientific exactitude and rules symptomatic of colonialism. Impossible hybridisation as an idea was sparked whilst spending two years on Ascension Island, South Atlantic. We lived on Green mountain, a human created cloud/rain forest that was created after Charles Darwin briefly visited the island on his return trip on the Beagle (complicated, but fascinating story involving Darwin and his friend at Kew Gardens, Joseph Hooker). A self sustaining rain creating forest was created with plants from all over the world still coexisting, becoming a model for tera-forming Mars.

There is a great sense of a kind of inclusive fecundity on Ascension. These ideas keep developing in my work, which is all about connections and the desire to create some kind of parallel existence.

Derrick Guild