Mick Rafferty           about the Ukiyo-e Floating Image Series

The influences and inceptions for these works have been strongly influenced by the “floating world” iconography of traditional Japanese artworks and prints.

The perverse attractiveness of the imagery resides in the inscrutable and enigmatic character of the appropriated faces and figures. Regardless of activity, facial features remain emotionless, detached, devoid of purpose, emasculated by stylistic shortcuts to become cartoons of indefinite gender, occupying space only to satisfy the pictorial whims of the artist.

The use of figuration within this series of work exists as an exit strategy from my absorption in abstract work. The Japanese imagery supplies a context around which composition, spatial manipulation, colour and surface content can reside with purpose, meaning and intent. The figurative imagery has become a minimal shorthand, a collection of shapes and gestures pared to economically provide the visual information but without any specific message.