Paul Mc Laren

Paul Mc Laren  is an Artist from Manchester. He studied Art and Design at Exeter College of Art.

As a Sculptor, after graduation, with numerous exhibitions and performances in Manchester, London, Glasgow, New York, Prague, Canada, Norway and Russia, his work took a dramatic turn in 1990. He abandoned what he saw as the anticipated art form enjoyed by a small elite audience, and directed his attention to the street, where one could meet a broader and demandingly brutal public. With an appetite to readdress commonly accepted truths, was a consuming desire to seek the origins of hidden truths. A knowledge of historical facts, rites, myths, mysteries and propaganda, applied with the carnival tenet of ”turning the world upside down“, created the fertile ground for a fantastic reinvention of another truth, in an artistic form. The sculptural skills acquired during study, was also one facet of the desire to bring broken motors and machines back to life, but with a function to drive a human emotion in mechanical form. This gave way to the Mechanon, (mechanical nonsense) which personified the object and led the way toward the kinetic costume, which became his trade mark.

Coupled with his passion for the works of Artists such as Gustave Courbet, Jean Tinguely, Francis Picabia, Josef Beuys. Through Dadaism: Duchamp, Hausmann, Tzara. The work of Alfred Jarry and the contemporary work of Peter Greenaway, was the context of Paul Mc Laren’s world of making sense from the absurd, from the hidden, from the ignored and the forgotten.

As a result he leaves us with finely sculpted and precisely built mechanical, large kinetic costume constructions. Objects, whose function is to bring the machine to life, with the power of human energy. A performer who stands at the heart of the art, whose body brings about colour, rhythm, dance, art and performance of human passion, in a grand and spectacular celebration of life.