Joel Ralston is an Australian artist who's work emerges through a complex networks of signs, forms and images woven together to produce searing and darkly vaporous works. His drawings and paintings, when isolated, form disparate fragments of experience, memory, or sensation. When grouped together however, they generate strange visual narratives, and develop complex and intricate relationships to one another. They are often obsessive, both in process and subject, and target the psycho-sexual nature of human fear and desire. Drawing links between otherwise unrelated and often widely varied subjects and themes, they probe inwards into the private and often obscure realms of the psyche.
Deconstructing the subject (both literally and figuratively) is a vital part of Ralston's process. Focused almost exclusively on the human body, the works examine the inner workings of its flesh, the fine line it treads between pleasure and pain, its interaction with the environment it lives in, the contemporary culture it thrives on, and the undercurrents of both physical and psychological anxieties it experiences on a daily basis. Themes of gender confusion, repressed neurosis, mental illness, ancient mysticism, addiction, lust, mortality, violence and melancholy are often interwoven with an underlying sense of humour and veiled seriousness.