Adrian Cox

About

Adrian Cox uses oil painting to showcase a suspended mythic reality called ‘Borderlands’, a kind of Edenic ecosystem of dense forests and expansive waterscapes, featuring elements of both pre-human and post-human culture. The inhabitants of Borderlands are known as ‘Border Creatures’, hybrid, non-binary and fluid identities that are simultaneously human, plant, mineral and viscera. These recurring characters perform social roles such as scientists, artists, gardeners, musicians and mystics and go by names such as ‘Big Thinker’, ‘Glow Gardener’ and ‘Veiled Healer’. Importantly, they live in harmony with their surroundings, spending their lives in quest of self-knowledge and understanding their relationship to each other and their environment. Also part of this seemingly idyllic world are the Border Creatures’ antagonists, known as ‘Specters’, which are represented by bright, glowing energy forms. The relationship between these two different mythological species form the narrative tension of this ever-growing series of works. Cox’s paintings are unmistakable in appearance, most of them featuring a colour palette of highly saturated pinks, oranges, blues and violets, reminiscent of the colours of a sunset or sunrise. Besides being visually arresting, it is also emblematic of a liminal or twilight space, where divisions between self and environment are not so clear, where the future and the past often mix together, where the beautiful and grotesque are difficult to distinguish, and where identities are more complex than they are clear-cut. According to Cox, this sets up a dialogue between ideas of the Monstrous and the Other, and cultural understandings of the natural vs the transgressive. Throughout this dense and continually evolving mythology that exists in this body of work, pagan and religious themes feature heavily, where the characters enact rituals around ideas of transfiguration, penitence, redemption and sacrifice. As ‘Other’ as this strange world is in surfac