The Dream Factory presents Kevin Harman
May 17 by Amplify
Cultural insight
Twenty-eight-year-old artist Kevin Harman, the third son of a second-generation butcher, grew up in Wester Hailes, one of the estates that surround Edinburgh.
"I am like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," he says, mentioning the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, that other twisted Scot. "It tears me apart. On the one hand I'm out there as an artist intervening in people's lives, talking to people, getting my hands dirty creating real stuff in the real world that people have a genuine relationship with. On the other hand I'm exhibiting little drawings in the National Gallery of Scotland."
There is a masculine, visceral thread through Harman's drawings and sculptures. Golf clubs spill from dumpsters. A quiver of knives is thrust deeply into the rusted steel of a digger's claw. A plunger is stuffed into the face of a motorbike helmet and floats eerily in space. Raw fish explode from a plastic container.
"I root around in car boot sales, flea markets. I look in skips and tips and dig things out that are relevant to what I'm interested in. I think I'm trying to solve a problem, the problem of being an unrepressed young male and how he should or shouldn't behave," Harman explains.
But there's more to the work than a surrealist's chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table...
"My work is not just about giving people a shock or even about giving them pleasure. I think it's about opening up people's eyes and filling them with an awareness of the inherent beauty of things. It's a beauty that you can access without the excess that is the art system, the galleries, and the hierarchies within that. It's about making the world an art space, a global space where art can be made of anything."
Kevin Harman is a happy, creative hooligan. And you know what? That's all right.
