Daniel Valentine

I am both terrified and seduced by the world, and the prospect of the future —

Through drawings, my work seeks to map out the 'flesh of the psyche’. Representing systems that occur within - reflecting the tension of polarised life both in wider culture and from the hereditary stream of bipolar disorder in my family. Drawing’s legacy as a tool for mapping and structuring the world through design and architecture is significant, yet often an intermediary plan for an external outcome, I apply these features in the inverse and seek an internal image. I utilise retro- futurist styles in order to queer the time-frame they exist in, desiring the naivety or innocence of machines before the digital turn.

The psyche is an entirely embodied phenomena, not simply the chemical activity of the brain, but the body and brain’s combined subjective consumption and regurgitation of the world. The mind is an unknowable machine. There is logic enclosed in mystery. God’s biggest secret is kept within the confines of the psyche and its enigma. The psyche is like everything outside the world, expanding forever into darkness. My drawings capture this mystery, totally entranced by the impossibility of how we work. They come forward as symbols and faint formulations of truth. Mystery Machines and Mechanisms.

I consider my drawings as machines, and therefore as an expression of the human desire to mimic the ultimate universal machine of God, whether this be for creative or destructive purposes. One machine may produce wonder, another may facilitate war, either way a machine attempts to harness the power of the cosmos.