PARADOX
Gouache & Watercolour on Paper 2021
Artist’s Statement: Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox
Paradox was
inspired by Group Captain Jo Brick’s essay “Kill the Enemy, and Don’t Forget to
Buy Milk on the Way Home”. The painting evokes the sense of liminality
experienced by remote drone pilots who fight wars and insurgencies in distant
countries from inside home-based ground control stations. While inside these
bunkers they are at war. Upon leaving the bunker, they re-enter domestic life.
As Brick notes “their psychological existence occupies both war and peace”. The
ongoing rhythm of this existence creates a liminal zone where the pilot’s psyche
grapples with seemingly unreconcilable paradoxes. This agitation is deepened by
experiences of witnessing, perpetrating and perpetuating scopic intimacies of
surveillance, identification, targeting and killing.
The circles
in Paradox link and overlap in ways that draw the drone pilot, the
drone, and the surveilled or targeted, together. This occurs against a vast
sky, or could it be a seascape? This depends on the viewer’s perspective. A
sense of flying, hovering, floating is suggested. Are you a pilot, maybe a
drone, a bird or even an intergalactic space traveler passing by Earth? Perhaps
you are a target, living a precarious life on the edge of life and death? A melancholic
kind of resignation is felt as clouds semi-obscure details. These clouds act as
visual metaphors for liminality. They also act as metaphors for the
contemporary ‘cloud’ of networked, interconnected and interoperable militarised
and militarise-able technologies. This techno-cloud is the drone pilot’s
operational space. The colour red disrupts melancholia with warnings of
violence. The red squares denote computer screens, ‘windows’ into the scoped
lives of the targeted. The red tinged clouds speak to violence, blood and death;
reminding us of corporeality in a techno-world. The human-like outline indicates
the presence of a human in the loop, but can we be sure of this? It may be a
robot.
