About Living Fossils - Christopher McHugh Fine Art

Themes

My work explores the concept of preserving lived experiences in material form, as ‘living fossils’. The objects of everyday life in Japan and the UK – train tickets, fish at market – are transformed into modern day relics. I originally trained as an archaeologist, and bring to my work an insight into Japan’s social and material landscape, along with an understanding of the creative impact of chance events.

I am interested in the material traces people leave of their passing through time and space. Something as seemingly mundane as the stain left by a coffee cup on a table, or the stamp made on a train ticket as one passes through the station gates, are as much material records of life as the fossilized footsteps of early humans in African mud, or the remains of a prehistoric settlement. These traces, or ‘fossils’, all have a unique story to tell and a continually developing life of their own. My works tend to begin as collages that blend everyday imagery and ephemera, exploring this no-man’s land where the present becomes the past and the historical record is made. I hope that my ‘fossils’ are imbued with a sense of life, as much as with the passing of something.

Background

I studied archaeology at Durham and Cambridge, and in 2000 was awarded a Daiwa Bursary to carry out a one-year research project at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. I continued this study as a Japanese Government Scholar at Kyoto University. I have had numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout Japan and the UK. I have recently established a business in the North-East of England selling my own work and promoting artistic exchange between Japan and the UK.