Fat Man (Binary Bomb)

Collage, May 2015 (26.5cm x 27cm)

I have never set out to make representational art, and I try to resist narrative. The world enters my work primarily through its most reductive language: ones and zeros.

Here, however, an object intrudes—a form with an unmistakable history. The silhouette of the Mark III, or ‘Fat Man’, the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki in 1945, becomes embedded within an otherwise abstract visual language.

I am interested in the tension between these two forms of representation: the binary code that reduces information to its most fundamental state, and the bomb as an object that embodies an extraordinary concentration of human knowledge, technological ambition and destructive potential.

The work does not attempt to depict Nagasaki, nor to tell its story. The historical object is displaced from its original context and becomes an element within the composition—recognisable, but unstable; simultaneously an artefact, a symbol and a shape.

Perhaps the tension lies in that contradiction: abstraction confronted by an object that carries too much meaning.