Robert Mead is a painter and researcher. Led by field work he explores changing landscapes and lost places, binding together imagery and memories with found colours.
The strata of Mead’s paintings dig up histories which linger in the changing landscapes of today. Using the materiality of paint along with fieldwork and harvesting and making pigments, Mead’s work reveals overlooked residues of humanity on our planet. These traces can be both visual and colourful but sometimes microscopic and hidden. In these stratified landscapes the earth ruptures and transforms as ghosts of deep time intersect with fragments of his own memories. This imagery is bound with found materials and pigments, the clay of eroding cliffs, brickwork from houses which have toppled into the sea and the waste from old batteries. These materials are symptoms and traces of human histories and impacts but also the overwhelming power of nature. They are buried in the paintings’ layers, echoing humanity’s growing presence in the current and future layers of the Earth.
These multiple entanglements can be excavated; fragments of image and symbol to engage with and read through - making different visual connections. For Mead, this layering and interweaving of meaning through imagery and material is an ongoing process of reflecting on the changing conditions of our planet and imagining alternate ways of thinking about our relationship to both our past and our future.
Mead recently completed his PhD at the Slade school of art, having received scholarships and prizes including Jean Spencer and Malcolm Hughes research grants 2019 – 23 and the Max Werner Drawing Prize.