‘Miss Merry Go Round’
Toy cars encapsulated in resin with 24ct gold-leaf blocks.
135cm x 135cm
Circular Framed
Edition: 3 (each unique – 1 available
Dreammood
90cm x 108 cm
Surgical blades float cast in resin with 24ct gold leaf on wood and aluminium, handmade, float framed
Series of 8 (Each unique)
SOLD
‘Dreamgaze’
Surgical blades float cast in resin with 24ct gold leaf on wood and aluminium.
155cm x 120cm
Series of 3
SOLD
‘Shooting Heston’
Disarmed Bullets, Float Cast in Resin on Wood and Aluminium
185cm x 160cm
Series of 3 (Each Unique)
SOLD
Miss Bugs was founded in the early part of 2007, originally coming from a background in photography and graphics. Working in partnership, they developed fast, spontaneous working methods, cutting and pasting existing images, ‘remixing and sampling classics’ in art to create new pieces with their own mark.
Miss Bugs started out making small scale works on paper, using screen printing with hand painted elements. They then scaled the work up, making life size cut outs of characters to place in situ on the streets of London. These were left in place to become part of the cityscape and recorded through photography.
Their most recent work includes larger scale pieces, incorporating laser cut planes of wood, hundreds of small component objects and poured resin. These pieces are time consuming and labour intensive, and a long way from the quickly constructed art pieces of the early days. Miss Bugs has always taken a broad and varied approach to creating work. The combining of materials and objects, alongside the way contemporary imagery can be collaged together, either by hand, through photography, or using a digital process, is important.
The focus of the work has always been the human form, as Miss Bugs’ interest lies in developing ‘characters’ to tell a story.
Archetypal imagery from magazines, art history and films are used as a starting point, which are then cut, overlaid and distorted to produce character portraits with an arresting graphic look.
The influence of collage artists like Hannah Höch can clearly be seen. The layering and placing of colour and pattern is also intrinsic to the work, and is very much a hands on element for Miss Bugs in the construction of the final pieces.
Miss Bugs have exhibited in New York, San Francisco, LA, Paris and London. Their artwork is also in a number of significant private collections around the world.
Their new body of work produced for their critically acclaimed Echo Chamber Exhibition, explores how people are living
in their own individual echo chambers, caught up in
a broader network of communication, where their own beliefs are amplified and looped back to them endlessly on repeat.
Within these stark modern portraits and figurative pieces, the resin holds and preserves complex networks of choice components, creating kaleidoscopic chambers of interconnected patterns. Like the patterns found in nature, objects spiral like sunflower heads
or colonies of coral.
Using mathematical rotations, symmetry and mirroring, order is created to reflect the man-made social networks that people exist in today.
Suspended in resin, plastic Japanese charms, superheroes and surgical blades shimmer like defunct objects trapped in time.
The use of old toy cars and Lego figures is a nod to nostalgia for more innocent times. The figurative characters combine meandering organic lines with sharp graphic edges and colourful resin windows, which create a sensual reflective surface to the work, representing the TV and mobile phone screens that filter people’s perceptions of the world.
To make the large scale, mixed media pieces, ranges of techniques are used, from silkscreen printing onto aluminium sheets to resin casting. Approaching the work as a collage, the pieces are constructed using an array of materials, including thousands of small- scale objects: from delicate paper cut butterfly wings to planes of laser cut wood.
The work has a sculptural 3D quality that continually changes with the light when looking from blocks of glossy flat surface colour,
and then into the transparent depths of the resin.