The Adoration - Rock and Roll Sewicide

This work is an allegory of my relationship with Music and Art and represents my coming of age.  As a teenager, I loved David Bowie.  I lived and breathed anything to do with my hero.  At 16, I emigrated to Canada with my family.  It was a total culture shock and I was lost and homesick, like Ziggy Stardust I felt like an alien.  Listening to my music collection was my way of connecting to home along with the letters and mix tapes I received from my numerous pen pals garnered from the small ads of the NME.  I stayed in Canada for almost ten years but I couldn’t settle and moved back to the UK in 1987.  I met my husband not long after I came back and he encouraged me to go to Art college as he had done.  I finally found my niche and loved every minute of it.  I started out studying graphic design then progressed into other areas.  I graduated with a fine art degree in 1996 around the time the art world was full of fire for the YBA’s (Young British Artists) championed by Charles Saatchi.  There was a lot of debate as to whether their work was really art or just a marketing gimmick.  I read that David Bowie had befriended Damien Hirst and that the pair of them were embarking on a project entitled ‘Minotaur’ in which they sought to create the mythical beast using the donated body of a cadaver and the head of a bull.  It troubled me that Bowie, who had created so many mythical music creatures should suddenly jump on the YBA bandwagon.  It was bad enough that he had moved to New York, floated himself on the stock exchange, married a supermodel and straightened his teeth!  I could feel Ziggy spinning in his grave.

This ain’t rock and roll…this is genocide!