Jamie Shovlin

My work for In Conversation with Stuart Sutcliffe takes Sutcliffe’s iconic Höfner 333 bass as its subject. Cast against a hazy backdrop, the instrument’s headstock glitters under the heavy glare of stage lights. This scene is a recreation of a recreation – the drawing is life-posed from a still taken from Backbeat (1994), the film chronicling Sutcliffe’s time with The Beatles. Drawn in precise detail, the work celebrates the iconographic link between musician and equipment.

 

I question how information becomes authoritative and explore the way that we map and classify the world in order to understand it. This work becomes and intimate close up of a story that has been appropriated and mythologised through many sources, highlighting the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory