Joseph Vipond
Joseph Vipond is a visual artist whose work explores the different perceptions and interpretations of reality. History becomes a source of inspiration with which to create new fantasies and stories through artwork that urges the viewer to consider the wider ripples and chain reactions of certain events and movements. The artist seeks to examine the complex web of circumstances and chance that can be molded to offer a kind of explanation as to how we got to ‘now’. Putting a piece of himself into the work is crucial to Joseph’s practice and the work will likely show elements of the truth altered by his own imagination and fiction, forcing us to look at the world and what is going on in a completely different way.
Quiet Violence tells the story of how Britain’s dark past as a colonial power continues to shape and influence our world and our perception of reality. The project examines this through a prism of botany, and how the tropical plants that grow in the UK are legacies of a colonial enterprise in which westerners would venture to captured territories, claim ‘discovery’ over indigenous plants and ship them to Britain. Through a harmful bureaucracy where plants were given Latin names or that of the botanist himself, a kind of ownership was placed over nature in a way that meant the power and influence of the empire now flowed through the soil. Through the creation of these surreal worlds, the artist has put into practice the same forms of manipulation and distortion of the landscape as the colonial forces sought to do. Plants are created anew and exaggerated in strange ways that allude to how our view of the world is corrupted and obscured when the innocence of nature is peeled back. The artist took inspiration from 19th century illustrations of inaccurate and imagined tropical lands.
Find more of Joseph’s work below: