Joseph Stokes

สไตล์: Stuckism;

สถานที่: Chatham

เกิด: 1973

ชีวประวัติ:

Joe Machine, also known as Joseph Stokes, is an English artist, poet and writer. He was born in Chatham, Kent, and comes from a Romany background on the Isle of Sheppey. In 1988, he was sent to Alston House Approved School, Rochester, for the theft of scrap material, and the following year to Dover Borstal for young offenders, after burgling a greengrocers in Leysdown (Isle of Sheppey). He spent time claiming benefits and running the family business, an amusement arcade in Leysdown, as well as breeding Rottweiler dogs and working as a bouncer in South London night clubs. He started painting around 1988 and has not had any formal college art training. He has described creativity as the way out of the background in which he felt trapped: 'Painting and writing have been far better for me than any of the mistakes I made in stealing and fighting.' In 1999, he was one of the 13 original founder members of the Stuckists, an anti-conceptual art group co-founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. His painting Diana Dors With an Axe was used on the front cover of the first book on the group, The Stuckists, and also to promote the show The Real Turner Prize Show in Shoreditch in 2000. Machine has exhibited widely with the Stuckists, most notably in their first national museum exhibition, at the Walker Art Gallery for the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. The exhibition, titled The Stuckists Punk Victorian, was a definitive showing of the Stuckist oeuvre, and Machine was one of the 'featured artists'. Reviewing the Walker show, Mark Lawson commented, referring to Machine's painting, Sea Shanty: 'Although they set themselves