Jamie Wagg

History Recording Artist

This website is a working archive documenting more than four decades of artistic practice. It brings together paintings, drawings, performances, lectures, documents, digital works and research concerned with history, politics, representation and the ways in which meaning is constructed.

Much of the work developed outside the conventional exhibition circuit—in studios, lecture theatres and art schools—before finding its way into galleries and public collections. Rather than functioning as a portfolio, this archive traces the evolution of ideas, allowing works made many years apart, and in apparently different forms, to be read in relation to one another.

Underlying the practice is a continuing refusal of the old distinction between Theory and Practice. An artwork can be both a made thing and a way of thinking. Images, ideas, documents, objects and fragments of history are taken from one context and placed within another, where their meanings become unstable. What something appears to show is rarely quite the same as what we know it means.

History painting has provided a recurring framework for this enquiry, although not necessarily as painting. A surveillance image, a historical document, a digital environment, performance, lecture or a four-metre canvas can each become a means of recording and questioning history. The concern is less with illustrating historical events than with examining the conditions through which history becomes visible: who produces its images, who frames them, how they acquire authority, and how knowledge can fundamentally alter the act of looking.

Across the work, this frame may be physical, historical, political, institutional or ideological. What changes is the form.
The argument continues.

“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
— Walter Benjamin

Contents

Bodies of Work

Practice

Information

This archive is ongoing. New material is added as projects are revisited and catalogued.